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“A disconsolate brown man in an unabashedly gentrified neighborhood is the beginning of a below-the-fold news item,” thinks Eduardo, the core character in Alejandro Varela’s new collection of interconnected stories, The People Who Report More Stress. He is sitting on a park bench, just moments after an emotionally devastating hookup, when he delivers this blunt observation about the world. 

It’s this acute, pithy commentary that permeates each story in The People Who Report More Stress. In “The Superb Potato Famine,” Eduardo, sick and broken down by the state of healthcare in the United States, struggles to catch a cab back to Brooklyn. “The Six Times of Alan” looks at Eduardo’s love-hate patient-client relationship with a sometimes brilliant, mostly frustrating therapist. These stories are built like pressure cookers, all the tension roiling beneath every social interaction. Here, Varela uses his humor and wit to expose how people behave and react to one another, the biases they carry as successfully as the ones weaponized against them, as they navigate their lives with anxieties that are inextricable from an unkind and unjust history. 

Varela and I chatted over email about