"The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories" edited by Ben Marcus

At best, "Short Talks," "The Old Dictionary" and "Letters to Wendy's" are prose poems, filled with vivid images and smart turns of phrase. But they offer nothing in the way of narrative, no revelation of the human condition. They not only experiment with form but take experimentation to such an extreme that it's impossible to even call them stories. Which is not to say that shortness or disjointedness can't produce a great story: Diane Williams' "All American," included in this anthology, is shorter than Davis' contribution, but in its six brief paragraphs we get an entire narrative about a woman tinkering with the boundaries of aggression and love. The three "interviews" that comprise an excerpt from David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" are really two monologues and a conversation by unrelated characters. But they work together to portray an entire world of lives that revolve around sexual obsessions.

More common in this collection are stories that experiment with language and genre, and they are the ones that are the most satisfying. In George Saunders' "Sea Oak," the narrator, who works at a male strip club called "Joysticks," and his sister and cousin, young mothers who watch a TV show called "How My Child Died Violently" while halfheartedly studying for their GEDs, fester in a low-rent, ambitionless existence. The story feels like a typical treatise on poverty, until the characters' aunt comes back from the dead and, while decomposing in the living room, orders them to get their lives together. In "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," by Wells Tower, a group of marauding Vikings, who talk like contemporary badasses, set sail on their last kill-and-pillage mission. As with "Sea Oak" and "Alphonse Kauders," the surreal elements here give a new perspective to terrible events -- in this case, the merciless slaughter of an island's innocent citizens. And it's oddly hilarious when Djarf, the bloodthirsty captain, loses it when his crew insists on abandoning the mission. "Aaaaah! You motherfuckers are mutinizing me?" he yells in disbelief.

"A writer has to believe, and prove, that there are, if not new stories, then new ways of telling the old ones," writes Marcus. Anachronisms and touches of science fiction are not the only way that the writers in this collection do this. Others are more subtle and realistic, presenting stories that are, in fact, told and retold, but with a fresh perspective. A.M. Homes' "Do Not Disturb" and Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" quietly reveal a large story behind a protagonist's narrow point of view. Homes' narrator is trying to leave a bad marriage, "a situation that has become oxygenless and addictive, a suffocating annihilation," when his wife develops ovarian cancer. She is, as they both readily admit, a bitch, but we also see him needling her unnecessarily, unaware of his own role in their fights. Similarly, the father in "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" cannot understand why his daughter feels estranged from him, but through his account we see him rejecting her for being gay.

Stories are our most primal way of explaining ourselves to ourselves; they are an instinctual need. Most of the stories here put this need first, and that's why they work. It doesn't even really matter that they are structurally experimental, or that they defy classification by genre. What matters is that they contain that kind of story magic that can leave a person, as Marcus describes it, "paralyzed on the outside, but very nearly spasming within."

Although it comes closer to the end of the book, the spiritual center of the collection is Deborah Eisenberg's breathtaking story "Someone to Talk To." In it, Shapiro, a washed-up and somewhat depressed pianist, on a visit to a war-torn Latin American country, is interviewed by an English radio journalist named Beale who can't stop talking long enough to ask Shapiro any questions. Beale is an accidental prophet, an insufferable person who unknowingly reveals secret answers to Shapiro's private sufferings. In a sudden, impassioned speech (which purports to be about radio, not literature), he perfectly sums up the transaction between writer and reader that makes stories such a thrilling process of discovery:

"Oh my darling! Someone is talking to you, and you don't know ... what thing they've found to tell you on that very day, at that very moment. Maybe someone will talk to you about cookery. Maybe someone will talk to you about a Cabinet Minister. And then that particular thing is yours, do you see what I mean? Who knows whether it's something worth hearing? Who knows whether there's someone out there to hear it! It's a leap of faith, do you see? That both parties are making. Really the most enormous leap of faith."

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