"Why can't we all just get along?" Rodney King famously asked as Los Angeles burned. A quarter of a century later, the question has more power and resonance than ever. The tales in Scenes from the Catastrophe reflect our fractured world, capturing the misadventures and travails of the marginal and the displaced, of people aching for an affirmation of who they are and where they belong.

These short stories examine the fault lines of citizens' personal and professional lives in the twenty-first century and the causes of the subterranean rumblings that so often herald...