The short stories in Dreamers explore American masculinity in the twenty-first century. They also examine and complicate Asian-American identity at a time when decades-old stereotypes persist in the culture. In the title story, a war veteran returns home from Afghanistan to find an American landscape that has the feel and texture of a terrible dream. In other stories, men fixate not on women but on each other. In “Still Life,” the middle-aged main character is preoccupied with a friend who died over fifteen years ago. The main character in “At War with the Insects” pursues a man who was both persecutor and liberator at the lowest point in his life. Power and dominance are themes that surface in “From the Archive.” In the story, a visit to a...