Marianne Hauser's short fiction is a literary documentary of exile, the other-worldly travelogue of an imagination permanently displaced. These accounts of expatriates and lost children situate us in foreign realms, between the titillating intimacies of strangers and looming brutalities we can never quite see. In Hauser's fiction, expatriation is not a historical accident but a condition as essential to humans as breathing or speech. A young boy's suicide in "Heartlands Beat" or a child's vision of her piano teacher's corpse invoke the permanent dislocations that adulthood can never overcome....