Tinged with melancholy but rooted in resiliency, the exquisite stories of Bernard MacLaverty's Blank Pages display the perseverance of the human spirit. In "A Love Picture," a middle-aged woman, already no stranger to loss, consults a WWII news reel to determine the fate of her son. The harrowing but transcendent "The End of Days" imagines life in another pandemic as artist Egon Schiele and his wife, both stricken with the Spanish flu, spend their...