"Storytellers may be finite in number, but stories appear to be inexhaustible," Joyce Carol Oates once wrote. The words of one of the genre’s master practitioners have been proven true this summer by the large number of new short story collections lining our shelves. Though it may face stiff competition among readers from its distinguished cousin the novel, the short story form is flourishing, and the best new collections offer a blend of unique voices, styles and characters. A few of our favorites are featured here.

Dan Chaon’s Among the Missing contains stories of families that have stepped off the path to the American dream, with characters left to figure out where and how they stumbled. "Safety Man" tells of a woman haunted by the untimely death of her husband and her reliance on an inflatable doll in making the transition to widowhood. In another story, a pet parrot becomes a vicarious object of hatred for a woman who is convinced that her brother-in-law is guilty of crimes his family refuses to acknowledge. Many of Chaon’s protagonists are missing some key part of their past or future. In "Here’s a Little Something to Remember Me By," Tom’s life stopped during his teenage years when his best friend Ricky disappeared. Now, Ricky’s family latches on to Tom, living their son’s life through his. For Tom, who carries a dark secret, their microscopic observation of his life is oppressive, preventing him from reconciling himself to the disappearance. With his unusually perceptive voice, Chaon brings clarity to the confusion of people’s inner motives.

How we fail to understand those who mean the most to us is one of the messages delivered in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s collection The Unknown Errors of Our Lives. Borrowing from her rich Indian heritage and experience as a newcomer to America, Divakaruni writes about young people learning to accept the errors of their parents and immigrants who are adjusting to the wild, unimagined wonders of a foreign land. Suffused with magical realism, these stories convey the seduction of memory, the exoticism of the East and the struggle to fit in with a new culture. "Mrs. Dutta Writes A Letter," chosen for The Best American Short Stories 1999 anthology, explores the cherished old ways of a grandmother, which turn into an embarrassment to her daughter-in-law. Whether Divakaruni is writing about the accommodations we make between generations or the eternal pull of home, her storytelling is poetic in its imagery and dynamic in the ebb and flow of its voices.

Dogwalker, Arthur Bradford’s debut collection, assembles its cast of characters from the misbegotten and misunderstood of society. The disabled, disfigured and troubled star in these stories, along with dogs of all shapes and sizes. Some of the protagonists and their adventures seem plucked from the weird and warped headlines of a supermarket tabloid. In wonderfully straightforward prose, Bradford’s nameless narrators reveal an almost banal acceptance of the strangeness of life. His ear for dialogue, along with a sensibility that matches the singularity of his subjects, brings joy and laughter to lighthearted tales (tails?) that wag the mind long after they have been tucked neatly on the shelf. An original newcomer, Bradford shows us how extraordinary and provocative a genre the short story can be.

The Man Who Swam With Beavers, a new collection from Nancy Lord, brings Native Alaskan-inspired myths to life. Lord, who teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska, brings an authentic voice and modern interpretation to the deeply spiritual and enduring legends of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific North- west. The persistent need for contact with the wild plays a key role in the title story, as well as the other dreamlike fables that examine our responsibilities to one another and to the larger environment. Irony rules as the tone of this collection, as protagonists and narrators as diverse as God, a 14-year-old son of lesbians and an enormously fat performance artist illustrate life lessons in unexpected ways. "Afterlife" gives us a man upon whom massacred animals take their vengeance. "Wolverine Grudge" presents a disturbed woman whose bottled anger and need for revenge bring out the feral in her. Ultimately, the characters are on transformative journeys; where they end up is always captivating.

And the first shall be last. Mary Ladd Gavell comes from a short story tradition that forms the basis for the other collections here. Unpublished until after her untimely death in 1967, Gavell was the managing editor of Psychiatry magazine. Her story "The Rotifer" was published by her colleagues as a posthumous tribute. A new collection of Gavell’s work, I Cannot Tell A Lie, Exactly, demonstrates what a true gift she had for dialogue, setting and tone. It also conveys how lucky we are to have her stories more than 30 years after her death. Each one is a perfect gem, sparkling with the irony and guile that make the genre special. "Baucis" introduces a woman whose last words are misunderstood by her family, while the title story describes the preparation for a child’s school play with the humor and good nature that make Gavell’s writing timeless and bewitching. The opening story, a sadly sweet tale called "The Swing," mesmerizes readers with the ghostly visits of an aging woman’s young son. The same sad sweetness bookends the collection in "The Blessing," in which three generations of women fall into familiar roles as they wait for the eldest to die. John Updike selected "The Rotifer" for The Best American Short Stories of the Century, but any of the pieces in the collection could be rightly chosen for this honor.

Kelly Koepke writes from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Some people don’t believe that April should be devoted to rejoicing in ars poeticae. An early advocate of National Poetry Month, the late poet William Matthews, disagreed. Furthermore, he reminded practitioners that “the work of the body becomes a body of work.” Nothing of poets lives on except their lines.

Memorable lines are bewilderingly ubiquitous in FSG’s centennial birthday gift of Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems. Enough has been written about this extraordinary writer to hide her entire adopted country of Brazil from the map, but who mentions Bishop’s wonderful sense of humor? Consider one of the gem-like mottos in “Songs for a Colored Singer,” i.e. Billie Holiday: “I’m going to go and take the bus / and find someone monogamous.”

Like Matthews and Bishop, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins recognizes the value of humor, music and sensuous pleasures, all fleeting, but none more so than that which springs from writing itself. Collins’ poems often close on a down note, making the rest of the poem resonate in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible; and his most recent book, Horoscopes for the Dead, contains a microcosmic example. Reflecting on the “little time nearly every day” spent “on a gray wooden dock,” Collins concludes with the disappearance of nearly everything, not to mention himself: “gone are my notebook and my pencil / and there I go, too, / erased by my own eraser and blown like shavings off the page.”

Another important event this month is the publication of Robert Pinsky’s Selected Poems. Previous National Poetry Month columns enumerated his many and varied efforts on behalf of poetry not his own, so the very appearance of this carefully honed volume shines all the more brightly. In one of the entries, “Gulf Music,” Pinsky has written arguably the best poem about Katrina by choosing instead the 1900 Galveston hurricane as his subject. No one even knows the precise number of people who lost their lives in that unnamed horror, and the disjunctions of “Gulf Music” mirror perfectly its anonymous chaos and clashes: “After so much renunciation / And invention, is this the image of the promised end? / All music haunted by the music of the dead forever.”

The latest work from Major Jackson, Holding Company, possesses a treasure of notable poems and qualities. The collection is composed of strict 10-line curtal sonnets. Pre-empted by another reviewer in terming these poems “dark” and “wrenching,” I’d venture much further: Holding Company is the best book of Jackson’s career, combining lyricism and wide-ranging intellect not unlike Pinsky’s with something all his own. Lines nearly vibrate off any page in Holding Company—think of the levels of meaning contained in the title itself—but here are four particularly riveting ones: “Sartre said: man is condemned to be free. / I believe in the dead who claim to believe in me— / says, too, the missing and forgotten. Day darkens / on. I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you now.” Sing amen, somebody.
 

From Mexico, to the former Soviet Union, to England, Japan and the United States, the reach of the short story spans the globe. These five collections, some by established authors and others by writers just beginning to make their mark, offer a generous introduction to the richness of modern short fiction.

Chilly slices of modern life
Ali Smith, author of the critically praised novel The Accidental, has observed, "Stories can change lives if we're not careful." In The First Person and Other Stories, her fourth collection, she offers her unsettling take on contemporary life.

Smith's book is most notable for its air of experimentation. The story that opens the collection, "True Short Story," begins with a writer in a café, observing two men and imagining the story of their relationship before halting the exercise. ("I stopped making them up. It felt a bit wrong to.") It concludes with a series of pithy observations on the nature of the short form from writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Alice Munro.

Smith's style is terse and edgy, almost daring the reader to settle in. In most of these stories, the characters are nameless, and it's only possible to know their setting because of a passing allusion to London or some feature of British life.

One of the more startling tales is "The Child," in which a woman discovers a baby abandoned in her grocery store shopping cart. When she takes the child with her, it begins spouting conservative political dogma, soon laced with racist and sexist jokes. The First Person and Other Stories won't appeal to everyone's taste, but those who like their stories provocative and enigmatic are likely to find it a satisfying work.

Weird, wonderful and wild
Although he's unknown to the American audience, Yasutaka Tsutsui has captured awards in his native Japan for his science fiction. His collection, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno, translated by Andrew Driver, contains several examples in that genre, but it also sparkles with biting pieces of social and political satire that reveal a formidable talent.

Tsutsui excels at creating protagonists living in worlds uncomfortably recognizable as our own and yet decidedly dystopian. In "Rumours of Me," a young man suddenly begins to hear and read news stories about the most mundane aspects of his daily life. "Anything can become big news if the media report it," a newspaper editor tells him, bringing to mind the short-lived obsession with "Joe the Plumber" in last fall's presidential campaign. "Commuter Army" is a brilliant satire on the insanity of war, imagining platoons of soldiers who board the train each morning like office workers, the fortunate survivors returning home the same evening. "Hello, Hello, Hello" features a meddlesome "Household Economy Consultant" whose bizarre counsel sheds a revealing light on modern capitalism and our consumer culture.

The title story, the longest in the collection, is a complex exploration of human sexuality and evolutionary biology that plays out in the context of a space adventure. Throughout this wildly varied assortment of tales, Tsutsui's voice is witty and quirky, seducing us to suspend our disbelief for even the most fanciful narrative.

Riding the waves
Whether as a force for life or one of destruction, water in all its forms is the unifying theme in writer and artist Peter Selgin's powerful collection, Drowning Lessons. Selgin is never heavy-handed in his use of metaphor, and it's rewarding to trace the skill with which he employs it in many of these 13 stories.

In the opening tale, "Swimming," an elderly man disgruntled with the state of his marriage offers swimming lessons to an attractive younger woman. "Our Cups Are Bottomless" features a man in a coffee shop in a dying mill town, contemplating the suicide notes he's written as the town's two rivers rise in a raging downpour.

The most dramatic story in Drowning Lessons is "The Sea Cure." In it, two brothers take a trip to Mexico. Lewis becomes ill after drinking the local water, and Clarke meets a mysterious woman he believes will help secure medical treatment for Lewis, whose condition becomes more desperate with each page, until the story reaches its haunting climax. The collection concludes with the alternately hilarious and touching "My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas." Its narrator suffers from mysterious fainting spells while wandering New York City seeking a pair of pajamas like the ones worn by his late father, his search a metaphor for the attempt to find his way in the world.

Coming to America
When a young writer's first two stories are published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, it's a safe bet she's on the fast track to recognition in the world of literary fiction. In One More Year, Sana Krasikov, born in Ukraine and now living in New York, demonstrates why the early notice she's achieved is well-deserved.

Krasikov's fiction focuses on her fellow immigrants. Unlike the affluent Bengalis depicted in the stories of another young star of contemporary short fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri, however, her characters are struggling to plant their feet firmly on the first rung of the ladder of success in America. Most of the stories are set in Westchester County, New York, but it's hardly the country club and cocktail party world of John Cheever.

In stories like "Companion," "Asal" and "Maia in Yonkers," women from the former Soviet Union find themselves in low-end personal care jobs. Maia's son sums up her plight when he berates her, "Every year you say 'It's one more year, one more year!' " and his blunt indictment sums up the predicament of most of Krasikov's characters. Representative is Anya, the protagonist of "Better Half," 22 years old, married for a few months and working as a waitress, who observes that "trying to escape your tedious fate only led you back to it."

Their task won't be easy, but at the end of this consistently strong collection we're left with a feeling that the determination by Krasikov's characters to establish themselves in a new land will be rewarded.

Living and loving in Mexico
Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico's most distinguished living writer, offers a rich collection of stories in Happy Families. Taking his ironic title from Tolstoy's legendary observation, Fuentes exposes the dark corners of his characters' emotional lives with a piercing light.

Fuentes' prose is lush, almost poetic, as presented in this translation by the distinguished translator Edith Grossman. Indeed, after each story there is a free verse "chorus," many of them illuminating some troubling aspect of modern Mexican life.

In its 16 stories, Happy Families covers the subject of love in all its complexity. We meet a long-married couple raking over the dying coals of their relationship ("Conjugal Ties (1)"), a priest who's fathered an illegitimate daughter and lives with her in an isolated mountain village at the base of a volcano ("The Father's Servant") and a mother desperate to rescue her son from a life of street crime ("The Mariachi's Mother"). Fuentes is a keen student of human behavior, and if his Mexican historic and cultural references occasionally may be puzzling to non-Mexican readers, the emotions on display are universal. In "The Discomfiting Brother," the story of an impoverished man who returns to the home of his prosperous brother after more than 30 years, the former notes, "Life consists in our getting used to the fact that everything will be badly for us." That solemn observation serves as a fitting benediction to this collection by an acknowledged literary master.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

Why do so many inveterate readers shy away from poetry? If you count yourself as a member of this group, here’s your chance to break away from the book-club clusters whose participants have their noses buried in the latest novel or memoir—for it’s National Poetry Month, a time to celebrate a different genre.

Works in progress
This year we’re lucky enough to have an entirely fresh and fearless exemplar, the largely unknown Pearl London, who made poetry—or, to be more specific, poets—accessible to her students at the New School in Greenwich Village over the course of 25 years. The invited poets were required to bring not completed works but unfinished drafts, even jottings on envelopes, scribbled phrases or anything else that contributed to “works in progress as process.” The astonishing humility of poets who accepted the increasingly coveted summons included Nobel and U.S. poets laureate, as well as National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners. Equally astonishing is the genesis of Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with America’s Poets: some 100 cassette tapes, a complete catalog and, as editor and transcriber Alexander Neubauer tells us, “file upon file stuffed with copies of the [poets’] manuscripts and drafts” were found in a closet of London’s home after her death in 2003. Winnowing the tapes and papers of 100 poets to the 23 represented in this book was only the beginning of Neubauer’s task; each chapter also includes an introduction that locates the poets’ visits at a specific point in time: “who they were when they arrived at London’s doorstep, what they had written, what was later to come.” If you protest that you don’t live close to a doorstep through which someone like Maxine Kumin or Seamus Heaney is likely to pass, check out the rapidly growing numbers of special events and readings devoted to poetry in your hometown this month. Also take note of Robert Polito, author of the book’s postscript. As the director of the New School’s Writing Program, Polito was London’s boss as well as a participant in Works in Progress, as the seminar came to be known. Polito’s most recent addition to his string of much-lauded titles, a collection of poems called Hollywood and God, has been featured on the web in a variety of forms, including interviews, personal statements and archived audiovisual material. For a sample, go Googling.

New thinking
One of the most amusing chapters in Poetry in Person represents Robert Hass. His newest publication, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, has as its anchor “Meditation at Lagunitas,” the poem whose opening lines became, almost overnight, a cultural mantra: “All the new thinking is about thinking / Hence it resembles all the old thinking.” Hass came to London’s class with his thoughts somewhat awry, having mistakenly brought the very first draft of the poem, forgetting its three-line second page and thus having to quote it from memory. In addition to adding to his own canon—see “My Mother’s Nipples” for a jolt—during the past 30-odd years, Hass has worked tirelessly as a translator; and during his tenure in our nation’s capitol, he inaugurated “The Poet’s Choice” series for the Washington Post Book World. Hass’ aesthetic functions like Neubauer’s introductions in Poetry in Person, and perhaps it functions best in triplicate fashion: Whether writing about the maternal body, rendering into the American idiom a piece originally in Polish or turning our attention to a contemporary from our own country, Hass aims, sometimes mercilessly, to give the subject at hand such a real, palpable nature that we sense a new living presence, one demanding our acquaintance, on our doorstep.

A master wordsmith
Easily the best-known and most acclaimed poet with a new book available on shelves today is Derek Walcott, one of those Nobel winners Neubauer mentions as a visitor to London’s classroom. Perhaps coincidentally, White Egrets flows—or beats its wings and flies—more naturally out of Midsummer, the 1984 collection upon which Walcott was laboring at the time of his visit to Works in Progress, than any of his books since then. Nature collides with history, history with nature, with humankind and language acting as go-betweens, and no grander verbal or intellectual magnificence has been seen in our time. Not only does White Egrets convey the masterful wordsmith’s ability to combine near- Elizabethan diction with Caribbean patois and even American slang (“What? You’re going to be Superman at seventy-seven?”), but the collection also serves as a reminder of his dramatic achievements. Among these is The Haitian Trilogy, which resonates all the more tragically in the aftershocks of that country’s horrific earthquake, the effects of which will be felt for at least as long as the slave rebellion and the savage corruption of the Duvalier regimes.

The human element
Andrew Hudgins—who, like Polito and Deborah Digges (see box), represents the younger generation here—has garnered nominations in his prolific career for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. American Rendering: New and Selected Poems gives ample proof for the critical esteem in which his work is widely held. Hudgins’ poems are often funny, hinging on a joke or wisecrack or malapropism, but human nature red in tooth and claw has always been his greatest theme, whether writing about the pain, fear and trauma that are an inevitable part of childhood, or the female victims of a serial killer (“It’s raining women here in Cincinnati”), or the three young men murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during Mississippi’s “Freedom Summer,” repeating and repeating their names, “Goodman, Cheney, Schwerner,” in the difficult litany required by the villanelle.

A light extinguished too soon
The poetry world reeled out of its accustomed orbit last spring when the news traveled that Deborah Digges had committed suicide at the age of 59. Fewer poets have, throughout their careers, been seemingly more life-affirming. We’re lucky to have been left, as part of Digges’ legacy, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart, a final collection of her work that will be published next month. In beautiful and multilayered poems such as “The Birthing,” we experience, through the poet’s words, not only a calf ’s fraught entrance into the world but also one of the means by which humans seek renewal—“[we] made love toward eternity, / without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.”

How lucky too that Digges’ work is so readily, personally and manifestly available through audio and video archives—including YouTube, where Digges can be seen and heard reading the aforementioned poem. She also bequeathed to the world two memoirs full of the flora and fauna she loved: Fugitive Spring (1992), focusing on her Missouri childhood, spent largely in the apple orchard outside her house; and The Stardust Lounge (2001), recounting her travels and travails as a mother seeking to give a new life to a troubled son through empathetic immersion in the animal world. For those seeking a personal invitation into Digges’ life, and thus into her poems, these memoirs are doors that will always remain open.
Poet Diann Blakely’s most recent book is Cities of Flesh and the Dead (Elixir Press).