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A radiant contentment pervades Curtis Sittenfeld’s stories in her latest collection, ‘Show Don’t Tell.’

Unfortunately, the line between contentment and complacency is all too thin.

Aside from regular emergency drills that the family runs, they’ve all found enough monotonous contentment in their isolation to keep themselves from thinking of what life may be like above ground.

By stepping back — just a little — I’ve begun to appreciate what I have, to find contentment in the slower rhythms of cooking and the small rituals of eating.

But the story of the Irish general election on Nov. 29 is nowhere near that simple, and definitely should not be understood as evidence of widespread contentment with the status quo.