The nine short stories in Marisa Silver's debut collection Babe In Paradise all take place in the crumbling neighborhoods of a Los Angeles that hasn't lived up to the expectations of her morose, anxious characters, and all nine are summed up by titles that resonate with multiple meanings and implications. In "Two Criminals," a man impersonates his dying brother to facilitate his brother's adoption of two little girls; the eponymous second criminal is not the dying man who designed the scheme, but the girls' natural father, who considers blocking the adoption out of fear that he's ceding property he may one day wish to claim. The passenger in "The Passenger" is an abandoned baby, who helps the child of a mentally ill woman to understand how she herself has been taken for a ride. The thief in "Thief" is a teenager who breaks into the house of a single mother and her wheelchair-bound son, but it's also the forces of nature that crippled the son, as well as the intangible process of maturation that's making him less reliant on his mother. And in "Falling Bodies," Silver's story of an elderly man sharing his house with a young woman and her infant places equal weight on both halves of her title: the feeling of being out of control implied by "falling," and the confluent feelings of mortality and sensuality that come from being in a body. Babe In Paradise's narratives are short, but carefully composed, perhaps to a fault. Silver often wedges her protagonists' backstories in clumsily, as though afraid that a missing detail will throw her portraits out of balance. She's also still overcoming a youthful tendency toward over-descriptiveness—"the night was dark" doesn't require "no stars shone through the thick layer of blackness" as a modifier—and unnaturally convivial dialogue. (Do people really say things like, "Philip scores with his incredibly subtle sense of humor, and the crowd goes wild"?) Silver's turns of phrase are often clumsy, but just as often, they're as graceful as her ability to end a story in a way that leaves later events oblique but visible. The loveliest piece in Babe In Paradise is the award-winning "What I Saw From Where I Stood," in which a stillborn child, a rat infestation, and a carjacking make the frailties of a newlywed couple so achingly clear that they become paralyzed. In juxtaposing the interior crises of lonely folk, Silver illustrates how people rely on each other without even realizing it, and how they nevertheless remain prisoners of their hopes.