Tread and Other Stories is a moving, unsettling, and ferociously humane collection. The characters are achingly real: the moments at once gut-wrenchingly singular and utterly recognizable. There's a satisfying range here-from a female prison guard with a yen for bad boys to a lost young man who finds common ground with the French artist Rene Magritte. Dempster deftly explores the distortions that often accompany our closest relationships, and yet his gaze is always compassionate, never critical. He has created a series of intimacies, each built to make us feel things that we usually only allow ourselves to feel when we're at our boldest: the desire to pinch the world and have the world pinch us back.