"A young girl delicately chastises her uncle returned from World War I: 'You could have written about home . . . I don't know. Remembering. About missing the things at home, about missing.' "Early in Thomas McConnell's story collection, A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes, the work's overarching theme announces itself in such moments of minimalist dialogue, a theme reworked, replayed and reinterpreted through a group of loosely connected vignettes that come together convincingly within the context of the book: that of longing, of yearning, of the not always reconcilable importance and...