In his award-winning collection, “The Rest of the World,” veteran high school teacher Adam Schwartz imagines the lives of teenagers in Baltimore City’s broken neighborhoods. With action-packed, often heartbreaking plotlines, vivid settings, and screen-ready dialogue, eight stories make it clear how carefully Schwartz has observed and listened, how deeply he has felt, in his decades in and out of the classroom.

For the most part, the stories are told by or through the young characters themselves, completely immersed in their worlds. Only the last story in the collection contains a character that might be a stand-in for the author. “U.S. History” could be taken as memoir, except that the teacher’s name is not Mr. Schwartz. In it, a student named Dario announces that he will have to go to a funeral — the funeral of his younger brother. The narrative unfolds in just a few minutes, as Dario’s classmates react to this news. But as the narrator explains, “Funerals were not uncommon at our school. Each year students were shot in their neighborhood or someone else’s. … I could fill a classroom with these incandescent souls.”

Adam Schwartz has filled a book with “incandescent souls.” They are not dead, but they are living lives profoundly warped by violence. In “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” and “Carmen and Ant”, a careless comment or act ignites a bloody clash. In “The Rest of the World” and “Elegance,” characters use violence to protect the people they love. And even in the stories where no one gets hurt, no one is safe, either.

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