“Butcher’s Perfume,” the story that opens Sarah Hall’s new collection The Beautiful Indifference, itself begins with a note-perfect sentence. “Later, when I knew her better, Manda told me how she’d beaten two girls at once outside the Cranemakers Arms in Carlisle.” It ably sets up what is to come, both in the story that follows and in the larger book that contains it: unlikely friendships, sporadic eruptions of violence, and structures that pivot neatly in time and space. (via Livid Nature, Bleak Isolation, and Dozens of Dead Bees: On Sarah Hall’s “The Beautiful Indifference” | Vol. 1 Brooklyn)