I love it when publishing myths are proven wrong. You know the type of myths I’m talking about: “literary novels don’t make the bestseller lists,” “poetry doesn’t sell,” “anything written by Stephen King will be a hit.” There is a myth that major New York publishers don’t publish short fiction any more, no matter how good it may be. The arrival of Jean Thompson’s luminous and heart-breaking collection Who Do You Love proves that sometimes publishers do the right thing.

Thompson has gained a following among lovers of short fiction over the last 15 years, winning accolades and awards along the way. Who Do You Love, her first collection in a decade, shows that she is among the best writers of short fiction working today. She writes of men and women trying to understand their choices in love and life, of teenagers and children sorting out the incongruities of adulthood, but she is neither sentimental nor caustic. Instead, she presents her characters-—ranging from a kidnapped six-year-old boy to a grandmother approaching senility-—with a clear-headed compassion that allows the stories to grow up around them in unpredictable, satisfying ways.

Who Do You Love is divided into three sections of five stories each. The first section, titled “Who We Love,” contains stories about love, but none of them are love stories in any traditional sense. In “All Shall Love Me and Despair,” Annie’s junkie boyfriend Scout kicks his habit in the backseat of a stolen car as she drives him cross-country to the Pacific Ocean. Thompson deftly moves from the matter-of-fact (“The tidy way the needle slipped beneath the skin, took its discrete bite, then the thread of pure amazement feeding into you. He liked the precision of it.”) to the chilling (“His eyes rolled back in his head like heavy silver pinballs. A piece of indifferent Chicago sky hung in the window. The room smelled of gas and sugar, a closed, wintertime smell.”) and still manages to suffuse the story with a weary sort of hope.

The section entitled “Other Lives” contains stories that give the reader windows into the complexities of memory and the illusion of appearances. The narrator of “Fire Dreams” watches the perfect façade of a subdivision crack as she carries on an affair with one of the volunteer fireman from the firehouse next door. In “The Widower,” a young married couple has to deal with the aged former owner of their new home. While the wife takes pity on the man, the husband begins to see that the old man’s recent widowhood may not be as sad or as innocent as it seems. The most daring story in this section is “Ice Angels,” in which an angry teenager, heading to Chicago to become a prostitute, finds her first glimpse of beauty and salvation when she is stranded in a snowstorm.

Stories of the dead and the lost fill the final section, “Spirits,” but like all of Thompson’s fiction, there is no nostalgia or pity here. One of the most affecting stories, “The Rich Man’s House,” tells of a woman who housesits for a wealthy neighbor even after the man mysteriously disappears. What starts as a nuanced and intriguing character story of a woman left by her husband goes off in an unpredictable, almost mythic direction that feels as correct as it does amazing.

It’s as difficult to synopsize Thompson’s stories as it is to pick out favorites. Each of the stories in Who Do You Love is a gem. Her keen eye for the telling detail and her ability to enter the heads of a wide range of characters make reading Thompson’s work a joy. But it’s her precision with language and her gift for creating extraordinary images from mundane sources that really draws the reader into her stories. An aquarium tanks holds “little poisonous frogs like china figurines.” Suburban lamposts throw “arcs of light on the white, white gravel of flower beds, on the acid-green grass.” A young girl thinks of the Vietnam war as “somewhere overhead, tethered above everything like a giant balloon.”

Jean Thompson is the real thing—-a writer who is devoted to her craft but who is not afraid to let her explorations of emotion take her down unexpected and even contradictory paths. Who Do You Love is a clear indication that the art of short fiction is alive and well-—and in very good hands.