4. The Boy Without a Flag, Abraham Rodriguez

The South Bronx in 1980. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Abraham Rodriguez’s first collection of fiction is set on the fire-scarred streets of the South Bronx in the 1980s, after the planned shrinkage of the city planners cuts off public services to low-income areas of New York City. A teenage girl is pulled off a sidewalk into a van and disappears, children play in the ruins of gutted buildings, and in the title story, a Bronx-born student refuses to pledge allegiance to the American flag at school. These stories about how life continued in a part of the city that officialdom tried to abandon are mesmerizing, with glimpses of tenderness appearing among the day-to-day brutality.