Karen Russell’s startlingly original collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, features graceful and seductive prose that transports the reader into surreal and yet utterly plausible realms. Many of the stories are set in Russell’s native region of South Florida, but it’s not the familiar territory of high-rise condos and golf courses it’s a world of alligator-infested swamps, ghosts and spectral moonlight. The adolescents who people these mostly first-person tales aren’t hanging out at the mall or gabbing on cell phones. Instead, they seek their identity in a kind of edge world that features such exotic venues as the girls’ home of the title story.

Highlights include "Haunting Olivia,"  in which two young brothers engage in a daring nocturnal diving exercise searching for their drowned sister, and "from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration,"  a one-of-a-kind story of filial devotion. In every story, Russell demonstrates a mastery of her craft, an achievement made even more compelling by the fact that she’s only 24 years old.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Pennsylvania.

Just as celebrated a writer is John Edgar Wideman, who with the publication of his latest collection God’s Gym shows why he is the first author ever to win the PEN/Faulkner Award twice (for 1984’s Sent for You Yesterday and 1990’s Philadelphia Fire). Nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for nonfiction, his stories have appeared in numerous national publications including Harper’s, GQ, Esquire and even The Best American Short Stories.

Almost like jazz, there is a rhythm to Wideman’s prose. His sentences are long and dense, but have a snap to them, a staccato that is musical. In “The Silence of Thelonious Monk” there’s such a sense of urgency, a rush to the writing that it is hard not to fall all over yourself in the process of reading. In imagining the dramatic ending of the love affair between the two poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, he writes, “love offered, tasted, spit out, two people shocked speechless, lurching away like drunks, like sleepwalkers, from the mess they’d made. Monk’s music just below my threshold of awareness, scoring the movie I was imagining, a soundtrack inseparable from what the actors were feeling, from what I felt watching them pantomime their melodrama.” Wideman is a writer who knows how to grab you by the heart. His characters do not shy away from the sometimes harsh explorations of love, race, self, but face them with such electricity, such pointed emotion, that the reader becomes better for the experience. Wideman’s writing challenges you, shows you both beauty and despair. It is an engaging challenge though, one you can’t help but returning to again and again. Lacey Galbraith is a writer in Nashville.

A MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of both an NEA grant and a Guggenheim fellowship, and the author of more than 10 works of fiction and nonfiction, Charles Johnson is more than a little prolific. His novel, Middle Passage, won the 1990 National Book Award while his latest short story collection, Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories is sure to crack apart any notion that today’s fiction could ever grow stale.

In this collection, stories are vehicles for conveying philosophical conundrums or questions of self. Moving across cultures and through centuries, Johnson creates worlds where a man’s dreams are taxed and Dr. Martin Luther King has a revelation while perusing the contents of his refrigerator one long night. Historical figures such as Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes and the aforementioned Dr. King make appearances, and in one of the best stories, “Executive Decision,” Johnson addresses the issue of affirmative action with grace and insight, accomplishing more through his characterization than any lawmaker ever could.

Though the issues and ideas that concern many of these stories are heavy, the prose never is. In “The Gift of the Osuo” Johnson describes an elderly African sorcerer as “brittle and serious in his leather cap and robe . . . bald as a stone, having around his head a few puffballs of gray hair like pothers of smoke.” In the title story the reader watches as Dr. King “picked up a Golden Delicious apple, took a bite from it, and instantly prehended the haze of heat from summers past, the roots of the tree from which the fruit had been taken, the cycles of sun and rain and seasons, the earth, and even those who tended the orchard.” Johnson’s prose is solid yet playful, restrained yet vivid. His characters are more than colorful and he never falls prey to taking himself too seriously. In essence, these stories are modern fables, tales that, with unsettling subtlety, linger with you long after the book has been put down.

Lacey Galbraith is a writer in Nashville.

The new Everyman’s Library collection of Alice Munro’s work, Carried Away: A Selection of Stories, features 17 pieces that give readers a fascinating overview of her development and range. One of the most skilled and intuitive fiction writers at work today, Munro long ago perfected the short story form. The stories collected here, selected by the author herself, cover a 25-year period and are drawn from early books The Beggar Maid, The Moons of Jupiter as well as from recent volumes, like the bestseller Runaway. With an introduction by Margaret Atwood, this collection is the perfect gift for admirers of Munro, or for readers not yet acquainted with her compassionate, well-crafted stories.

I want to live in Wyoming. In Elk Tooth, to be exact, where I would drink shots with and compare beards to and maybe drag home the people Annie Proulx knows. Surely she knows them. There’s no other explanation for the pulsing blood of life and death and hilarity that oozes from every living being (alligators and wolves and elks included) in her new short-story collection, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. With these 11 stories, Proulx cements a reputation built on The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes and Close Range. As in those works, here Proulx favors us with characters as spare, quirky and unforgiving as the Wyoming landscape itself. In Hellhole, Warden Creel Zmundzinski is at first befuddled by, then deeply grateful for, a pipeline to Hell that crisps the despoilers of his beloved backcountry. So what if he’s roastin’ citizens in there like ears a corn, as his friend Plato Bucklew accuses? Wyoming needs saving from tourists and outsiders, and if the devil signs on as an ally, Zmundzinski couldn’t care less.

Gilbert Wolfscale, the grim rancher in What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick? loves the land with an almost obsessive devotion. Yet Wolfscale’s beloved ranch is held in contempt by his citified sons, and his bewilderment is palpable and unforgettable.

As always in a book by Proulx, it is the details of plot, setting and character that hook the mind’s eye and remain there after the story fades. From the hay-bale bearing flatbed, afire and hurtling through the Wyoming dawn in The Trickle Down Effect, to the alligators easing after the dumb cows encroaching on a creatively vengeful gardener in the collection-closing Florida Rental, Bad Dirt makes you want to move to Wyoming, buy a ranch and snigger at the rest of the world. Jorge A. Renaud reviews from Texas.

Yann Martel begins both this set of four early stories (collected here for the first time) and his Man Booker Prize-winning novel, <I>Life of Pi</I>, with an "Author’s Note." On both occasions, he reflects with gentle deprecation upon his former self: a lost soul, an academic deadbeat, a writer who can’t seem to write his way out of a paper bag. One way or another, this schlemiel of a Martel stumbles into his craft and is saved (these words have a special meaning for the seafaring <I>Life of Pi</I>).

It is this stumbling that is so endearing about Martel’s writing, so paradoxically graceful. The unwieldy titles among the four stories bear witness to the essential unmanageability of any circumstance worth telling. Indeed, the title story carries the improbable weight of three layers of narrative. We never learn anything about the Helsinki Roccamtios, but it is the facts behind them that matter (and then again, the facts behind <I>those</I> facts).

"The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discor-dant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton" (yes, that’s the title of the story) happens because the narrator wanders through the city of Washington and notices a sign advertising a concert. A concerto named for a Private Rankin? A discordant violin? And who, for all love, is John Morton? Naturally, the narrator of the story must attend the concert and find out what it all means. The accident of seeing a sign turns into an urgent necessity. Thereby hangs the tale and perhaps all tales, all storytelling, life itself.

In "Manners of Dying," Martel seizes upon the most literal and unforgettable way to show how our stumbling, contingent natures determine our ends. The "story" is really nine parallel stories: nine different accounts of Kevin Barlow’s execution by hanging, out of possible thousands (we are given numbers 18, 319, 1096, etc.). The warden who writes to Kevin’s mother is always the same warden, but the Kevin is a different Kevin every time. From the contents of his last meal to the substance of his last words, each of the nine Kevins meets his death with momentous individuality. Whoever we are, Martel tells us, we are all in the same boat, and no two boats are the same.

<I>Michael Alec Rose teaches at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.</I>

Nearly 40 years after Mark Helprin’s first short story was published in the New Yorker, the talented author continues his exploration of the genre with The Pacific and Other Stories. In his first book in almost 10 years, Helprin offers up 16 stories of mostly ordinary people whose outward peace masks the turbulence within their souls. Helprin’s characters are all ages and sexes, and live in such disparate locales as Venice, Brooklyn and Israel. But what they all have in common is a quiet faith in their own ability to make a difference.

In Monday, a middle-aged contractor who still believes that an honorable life is a worthy one, bestows an unheard of gift upon a young widow. In Perfection, a slight Hasidic boy shows Mickey Mantle, Casey Stengel and the rest of the New York Yankees how the game of baseball should be played, with a Yiddish twist.

All of the stories are to the point one person, one problem. But such problems! Drifter Jacob Thayer, for example, must convince the inhabitants of a small town in turn-of-the-century Europe that the telephone is not God. In the title story, a young woman works in a factory while her husband fights World War II in the Pacific. She takes a small house in San Diego overlooking the ocean so there is nothing separating them but water.

Helprin skillfully bounces back and forth between whimsy and tragedy. The stories’ lack of connectedness is a thread in itself, a statement of humanity’s infinite capacity for sorrow and joy. Each of the men and women in this book are introspective, although they somehow contrive to be so without acknowledging any flaws in themselves. For better or worse, they’ve lived their lives to this point and now they are all searching. They are looking for love, death, hope, God and the better part of themselves. Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.