This book is brilliant, layered, funny, and so insightful about the way communities, like hearts, are made and unmade. I loved it. Alejandro Vaerlo is a marvel. — Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

This collection is full of vivid characters who resemble many people in my own life. These stories are funny, insightful and are, at times, cheeky AF! You can’t help but relish in them. — Rosa Hernandez, Marketing Manager at Third Place Books

In The People Who Report More Stress, Alejandro Varela cracks the veneer of gay domesticity to reveal the intricacies of anxiety and lust, bewilderment and promise, shelter and placelessness in everyday urban life. In linked stories driven by frenzied interior monologue and roving analytical glee, Varela pivots from the rules of bathroom cruising to the legacies of colonialism in international relations, the hustle of selling bootleg designer clothes to the racial hierarchies of Brooklyn gentrification. Moving deftly between satire and hyperrealism, comic excess and mundane pathos, The People Who Report More Stress dissects the minutiae of relationships to self, city, space, and sensibility so we don’t numbly succumb to the ‘structured order of things.’ —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door

Alejandro Varela’s The People Who Report More Stress effortlessly walks the line between humor and grief to create a portrait of modern queer life that is at once absurd and deeply sincere. These stories capture the small, lonely moments of everyday life, the rejections and misunderstandings and longings that make up great fiction. Varela can do anything. — Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians and People Collide

Alejandro Varela is one of my favorite short story writers, and has been for years. Time after time, the mix of curiosity, humor and care in these stories reminds me of the parts of my life no one else writing currently describes. An iconoclast of tenderness, a compass in the storm this life always is. — Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Varela has written a collection that is mordant, tender, and hilariously self-critical. These stories navigate the myriad creases between lust and longing, love and proprietorship, without resorting to sanctimony. This is an incredible feat of wry sincerity. — Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive

Having debuted with The Town of Babylon, recently long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction, Varela returns with a collection of interconnected stories focusing with bite and humor on parenting, relationships, racism, and class conflict. — Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

A searing collection about gentrification, racism, and sexuality. […] Varela provides invaluable insight on the ways stress impacts the characters’ lives, and how they persevere. Readers will be floored. — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

The prose shines throughout, with razor-sharp specificity about human nature and an entrancing rhythm… the collection shows a writer of impressive imagination continuing to deepen his craft. — Kirkus Reviews

This collection of linked stories gives a vivid and unforgettable voice to the anxieties of people whose experiences are frequently marginalized, from a struggling New York restaurant employee to a Selena-obsessed childcare worker and a man intent on speed-dating after the end of a long-term relationship. — Emma Specter, Vogue

For readers of A Lucky Man and Heads of the Colored People and fans of Bryan Washington and Jenny Zhang.

A collection of connected stories examinng issues of parenting, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict in gentrified Brooklyn.

The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected stories about a man named Eduardo. A deeply introspective, class-jumping, gay, Latinx public health advocate living in Brooklyn, Eduardo is all too aware of the stress that both hierarchy and capitalism are taking on his body.

In “The Six Times of Alan,” a brown-skinned parent of an adopted child with a deeper brown shade of skin finds himself in a dilemma—what to do about a simple conflict between his kid and the white child of another parent at the park who has framed his son as a menace.

In “Midtown-West Side Story,” Álvaro, a restaurant worker struggling to support his family, begins selling high-end designer clothes to his co-workers, friends, neighbors, and the restaurant’s regulars that he gets at warehouse prices out of a Hoboken basement from his shady friend, known only as “El Flaco.”

Speaking to issues of parenting, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict, Alejandro Varela deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities, but not being able to do anything about them

“I see Varela’s writing as a modern, urban entry in the tradition of works like John Cheever’s The Stories of John Cheever or Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—a tradition kept alive by writers like Teju Cole in Every Day is for the Thief and Jamel Brinkley in A Lucky Man.”—Danny Vazquez, acquiring editor at Astra House