There is something deceptively simple about Sarah Majka’s new collection of short stories, Cities I’ve Never Lived In. These are stories about memory, many of which take place in or around Portland, and they are stories written with a clarity that sometimes borders on the austere. But just as casual prose tends to be highly crafted and a discursive style is actually very stylized, memory, for Majka, quickly becomes far more complex than something that functions as a simple depository for our past experiences. To whom do our memories belong, exactly? How do we piece our own past together? And is memory a series of events, or is it a collection of stories that, paradoxically, become more distant from the events we try to remember the more times we recount our memories? The narrator of “Travelers,” an eerie story about a child who goes missing, a pastor with a poor memory, and a narrator with a faltering marriage, responds to these questions with disconcerting exactness: “All my memories were remembered memories.”

    So what are we to make of this notion? Where do we locate ourselves within our dislocated memories? Rather than provide any conclusive answers, the loosely linked stories in this collection that are, at times, vaguely novelistic in form, gather meaning around this ambiguity and the idea that, from the vantage of the present, our memories will always be just out of reach, like cities where we once lived but now fail to recall accurately.