Elizabeth Cox is among those rare Southern writers who bypass the expected and too often repeated elements of contemporary Southern fiction: stereotypical characters in bizarre situations, talking in colorful phrases, moving distractedly among the modern brand names of popular culture. Instead, Cox's fictive sensibility focuses on elements such as forgiveness, redemption and grace, giving her stories the deep and lasting appeal of those by Katherine Anne Porter.

In her short story collection, Bargains in the Real World, Cox examines the lives of 13 people struggling with tough choices. We meet Cox's characters long after real life has shattered whatever visions of the ideal they may have nurtured in childhood.

"Old Court" is the first person account of a fatherless 11-year-old girl's struggle to survive, with her mother's guidance, in the Reconstruction era. "The Last Fourth Grade" brings an unusual perspective to the problem of child abuse by focusing on the effect upon the wife, a beloved fourth grade teacher, who shoots her husband; the female narrator, a former student, visits her in prison.

One of the most haunting stories is "Land of Goshen." A childhood fever arrests the mental development of a boy whose mother comes to feel her life has been blessed. In this story, as in all her fiction, Cox sustains a plain and simple style. "The hour would be late before they stopped talking and playing games. Sara could hear the thunder grumbling in the distance, and the water dripping from the leaves gave an ending effect to the day that eased their minds." Cox brings her characters and her readers together on a level where seemingly small bargains are gains enough Cox won an O. Henry Award for "The Third of July," a story that follows a woman planning to leave her husband after 30 years, who reconsiders her decision after witnessing a fatal car crash. But all of the stories in Bargains in the Real World are winners. Elizabeth Cox's impressive career so far deserves more recognition than she has received. These 13 short stories demand and may get that attention.

David Madden has published 10 novels, including Sharpshooter, most recently, and over 30 works of nonfiction, including Revising Fiction.

Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of T.C. Boyle's productive career than its unpredictability, something that’s manifest in Wild Child, his ninth collection of short stories. Choosing as his epigraph Thoreau’s statement, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world,” in these 13 stories and one novella Boyle probes the shadow zone between the apparent order of daily life and the darkness that often lies just over the horizon.

Examples of Boyle’s fascination with this borderland abound. In “La Conchita,” a courier transporting a liver to Santa Barbara for transplant finds himself thrust back into a state of nature as he must choose whether to abandon his task to help rescue a family trapped in a mudslide. Another apocalyptic California threat—fire—broods over “Ash Monday.” There’s an escaped tiger outside Los Angeles and feral cats invading a snowy Wisconsin trailer park in “Question 62,” and in Stephen King-like fashion, “Thirteen Hundred Rats” reveals a man who turns to rodents to fill the void left by his wife’s death.

Though most of the stories are set in Boyle’s home state of California, he leaves that territory for two of his more powerful tales. “Sin Dolor” is the tragic story of a Mexican boy incapable of feeling pain and the doctor who’s moved by his plight, while “Unlucky Mother” tells of the kidnapping of the mother of a Venezuelan baseball star and the lesson it teaches him about the dreadful price of fame.

The subject of truth and lies forms the backdrop of two more of Boyle’s stories. In “Balto,” a father struggles to persuade his underage daughter to cover up his decision to let her drive rather than risk a conviction for driving under the influence. Another tale is entitled simply “The Lie.” In it, a disgruntled employee invents a horrific fiction to explain his chronic absenteeism.

Boyle caps the collection with the title novella, a reimagining of the story of “Victor,” the enfant sauvage whose appearance captivated French society at the turn of the nineteenth century. With surpassing compassion, Boyle recounts the efforts of a sympathetic Paris doctor to civilize the mysterious youngster, while in the process learning bitter truths about the gulf between civilization and nature.

Demonstrating a skill many writing at greater length would envy, in each of the stories in this masterful collection Boyle creates a world filled with vivid characters and captivating plots, rich in nuance and complexity.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Readers who have missed John Updike's chronically imperfect Harry Angstrom since his demise in Rabbit at Rest have cause to celebrate, because Rabbit is back. Well, sort of. The second half of Updike's new short story collection, Licks of Love, is a novella, Rabbit Remembered, which resurrects Harry in spirit if not in his perpetually libidinous flesh. Updike has written a Rabbit novel every 10 years or so since the first in 1960, with the story progressing along the same time line. With Rabbit Remembered it is now 10 years after Harry's death. His long-suffering wife Janice has married his friend and rival Ronnie Harrison. Son Nelson, who lost the family Toyota dealership and his marriage to a cocaine habit, lives with his mother and stepfather and has become a painfully sincere, slightly sanctimonious therapist.

Enter Annabelle Byer, who says she is Harry's daughter from the affair he had with Ruth Leonard 40 years before. Though she doesn't doubt the truth in the girl's claim, Janice wants nothing less than to stir up the memories of that painful past. Nelson, however, is taken with the idea that he has a sister (someone to replace the baby girl his mother accidentally drowned perhaps? Or at least a tangible link to the father for whom he had such a tentative love.) He tries to bring Annabelle into the family, with predictably uneasy results. A Thanksgiving dinner ends with insults and tears, prompting Nelson to move out of the family home. Yes, even dead, Rabbit manages to stir things up.

There are also a dozen short stories in Licks of Love, most of them the kind of gems that show why Updike is one of the masters of this form. As has always been the case in his short fiction, the men at the center of many of these stories seem to share elements of Updike's own life his Pennsylvania childhood, the suburban middle class experience in America during the 1960s and '70s.

There has always been more than a whiff of nostalgia in Updike's short fiction, and this seems to be even more true as the writer ages. Many of the stories are fond reconsiderations of flawed mothers and fathers, or memories of youth triggered by high school reunions or chance encounters with lovers from the past. Not surprisingly, all are beautifully etched with the elegance and intimacy we've come to expect from one of our finest writers. Robert Weibezahl is a writer who lives in California.

The map of modern American fiction is scattered with urban spaces, from cafés and diners to beauty parlors and laundries. These public areas function like the old town square, providing a place for locals to rub shoulders, gossip, hang out and people-watch. The Bubble, a New Orleans Laundromat, is one of these iconic spots in More of this World or Maybe Another, a book of linked stories by new author Barb Johnson. The Bubble is owned by Delia and her partner Maggie, and it serves as a gathering place for many in their diverse Mid-City community, embracing gay and straight; black, white and Latino; the recent immigrants and the old-timers.

As much as these stories are rooted in the neighborhood, it is four characters whose paths cross that are the centerpiece of the book. The title story, “More of This World or Maybe Another,” introduces Delia, then a teenager in rural Louisiana, on the eve of a school dance, when her strong feelings for her date’s sister threaten to upend her world. After moving into the city to pursue his music, her younger brother Dooley’s life is shattered by a devastating accident. Their friend Pudge survives years of painful teasing, but his adult years are spent wandering the streets in an alcoholic haze, spying on his teenage son, Luis. And in the final story, “St. Luis of Palmyra,” Luis finds refuge and peace in an abandoned car across from the Laundromat. The family one is born to and, more importantly, the one these characters piece together from friends, neighbors and co-workers, is paramount.

Johnson, who spent years working as a carpenter before pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing, creates complex, intensely human characters, almost impossible not to care about. Each story is suffused with warmth and empathy, focusing on those singular moments in life, painful or ecstatic and sometimes both, when everything changes. If there is a fault here, it is that some of the individual stories don’t hold up well on their own. Gathered together, however, More of This World or Maybe Another is a strong debut full of heart and memorable moments.

Lauren Buffered writes from Nashville.

Charles Baxter’s gift for the short story is manifested in Gryphon, a compilation of stories selected from four earlier collections, joined by seven previously uncollected works. In each of these 23 stories, Baxter offers the reader a brief but brilliantly illuminated glimpse into the world of one of his unique characters—quirky souls with whom the reader can somehow empathize.

After his brother’s death, a young single man becomes his nephew Gregory’s guardian, and is “terrified by every minute of his entire future earthly life”—overwhelmed by the unexpected responsibility suddenly thrust upon him. In his efforts to become a parent, he begins to create nightly imaginary horoscopes for Gregory, always with a positive outlook, to help his nephew navigate the sorrowful days following his parents’ deaths.

In “Horace and Margaret’s Fifty-Second,” Margaret visits her husband in the nursing home, recalling how he gradually lost his mind and memory, lately confusing the names of his beloved trees with the names of his children.

The title story features a delightful substitute teacher, Miss Ferenczi—a free spirit with a purple purse and a checkerboard lunchbox who mesmerizes her class with a tale about the gryphon in a cage she saw on her trip to Egypt. She ends the day by telling the students’ fortunes with a pack of Tarot cards—an act leading to her abrupt dismissal.

In one of the haunting newer stories, “The Old Murderer,” a recovering alcoholic, estranged from his wife and children, finds hope in what he learns about love and commitment from the murderer who moves in next door after his release from prison.

Baxter’s stories don’t have predictably happy conclusions. He simply leaves us with a lingering sense of having just met someone totally unlike ourselves, but a kindred spirit nevertheless.

One would think that writers whose works frequently attract the attention of censors would avoid presenting a high-profile target by gathering in one place. But a dozen of them have dared to do so in Places I Never Meant To Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers. Judy Blume, one of the nation's most popular and censored writers, has persuaded these accomplished authors to participate in a project that presents the written word in one of its most potent forms: short fiction. These stories focus on young people grappling with life, but they have an appeal to readers of all ages.

In this book, Julius Lester writes: Language can seduce us into forgetting where we are and who we are; it can make us believe in things we know rationally could never be; it can resurrect experiences of pain, discomfort, and suffering we thought we had forgotten. Is it any wonder that Plato banned poets from his utopia? Those are the sort of emotions summoned by these short stories, a fact that alone recommends the book.

The stories take on an added dimension, however, with the accompanying essays, which portray the writers' struggles with censorship and the self-censorship it provokes. All these writers ask for is to be allowed to use the language that is authentic to young readers. How else can they communicate and inspire? Norma Fox Mazer defines their dilemma: Where once I went to my writing without a backward glance, now I sometimes have to consciously clear my mind of those shadowy censorious presences. That's bad for me as a writer, bad for you as a reader. Rather than allow young children a view of the world through the safe window of a book, the censors would send them out into that world ignorant of its ways and its wonders. Books allow children to sample life at arm's length, to reflect on it, put it in context, speed it up or slow it down without the passions and ambiguities of the moment pushing them toward error. In a sly reference to the writer's revenge, Susan Beth Pfeffer says in her essay that you can never censor the future. Sadly, we live in a world of fearful adults who would censor the future of young readers every day.

Places I Never Meant To Be clearly demonstrates that what enlivens the heart of the writer startles the mind of the reader. Sometimes that can happen even in the shadowy presence of the censor.

Paul McMasters is the First Amendment Ombudsman at The Freedom Forum. His weekly essays on First Amendment issues appear on the free! web site at www.freedomforum.org.

A catfish farm in crisis, a young woman running an obstacle course of the heart, and two old friends at a Texas prison may sound like the elements of a tear-in-your-beer country song. Don't be fooled, though, for these elements make up three distinctive first novels determined to cure your summertime blues.

The back roads of Mississippi are dotted with catfish farms, manmade lakes stuffed with the bottom feeders most folks enjoy fried. And Steve Yarbrough's The Oxygen Man is one deep-fried novel. Original, bold, eerie, Yarbrough's novel takes readers on a trip through snake-infested environs where racism and violence ride shotgun with poverty. Ned Rose works Mississippi nights checking the oxygen levels on catfish ponds for Mack Bell, an old friend with a short fuse. His sister Daze (Daisy) works Mississippi afternoons at Beer Smith's tavern. The siblings occupy the same ramshackle house their parents left, but they don't talk much, and haven't since a horrifying event that occurred while they were in high school. Mack suspects some of his African-American workers have started sabotaging his ponds and enlists Ned to give them a dose of southern justice. After a lifetime of being pushed around by Mack, Ned has a decision to make. And so does Daze, who, like Ned, walks through life as an apparition. What is so stunning about Yarbrough's debut is its downright rawness. He creates some of the creepiest scenes and characters in memory, such as a dead-on portrayal of a high school football coach at an all-white school, the kidnapping of an Ole Miss co-ed, and a screaming motorboat ride that ends in disaster.

But for all the nervy southern gothic touches and the relentless threat of violence, Yarbrough writes with tremendous heart. The pages pulse with a Faulknerian aura of familial fate and the quiet determination to overcome one's own history.

Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, constructed by chapters that jump in time and place, traces the smart and sassy Jane from summers on the Jersey shore through the rough and tumble world of New York publishing. Bad dates, neurotic bosses, a boyfriend nearly 30 years her senior, and perfectly drawn suburban parents mark Jane's frenetic existence.

Bank's whipsmart bildungsroman leaves readers not only nodding their heads in painful recognition of empty bottles and broken hearts, but also holding their sides with brutally honest laughter. To wit, in one of the novel's best episodes, "The Floating House," the socially naive Jane travels to St. Croix with her boyfriend Jamie to visit his ex-girlfriend and her new husband. Or, in the book's penultimate vignette, Jane, recently single, decides to follow the advice of a book called How to Meet and Marry Mr. Right, a thinly disguised The Rules. But rather than just reading the book, the goofy Jane actually has imagined conversations with the book's uptight authors, Bonnie and Faith. Bank writes of Jane's first date with Robert, whom she meets at a wedding: "I don't know what a Luddite is, but Bonnie won't let me ask." When the check comes, Faith says, "Don't even look at it."  

"What are you thinking about?" Robert asks, putting his credit card in the leatherette folder, "$87.50 for your thoughts."

"Be mysterious!" Bonnie says. "Excuse me, I say," and go to the ladies' room.

While Bank captures the vagaries of 90s relationships how often to call, when to stay over, when to move in together, and when to bail with a wry, understated style, she never falls into the first-novel trap of self-indulgence. In fact, Bank provides the kind of balance normally found in seasoned writers. Bank gives her characters the room to move, breathe, and be human. Even when her creations suffer from disappointment, jealousy, anger, and feelings of abandonment, Bank manages to keep everything in perspective. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing mines the delicate space between humor and heartbreak.

Prison is never fun, but prison in Texas is a whole other dark world, especially at Hope Farm State Penitentiary, the backdrop for Robert Draper's first novel, Hadrian's Walls. Hadrian Coleman and Sonny Hope are childhood buddies who end up linked for life when Hadrian saves Sonny from a perverted judge in a cornfield when they are in high school. But the judicial system in Texas isn't always fair, and Hadrian takes the rap, in turn landing in the roughest prison in the country, a place pock-marked by graft, corruption, and mysterious deaths of prisoners, and a place run by Sonny's father, Thunderball. But now Hadrian, who had a celebrated escape, has gotten a full pardon, thanks to Sonny. The problem is that Sonny wants something in return, something that likely will land Hadrian right back in the slammer. Draper's story scorches through the world of East Texas toughs a melange of prison guards, crooked state legislators, wandering wives, and ex-cons, occupants of a world where justice is in the eye of the beholder and prison construction is booming business. Although the pacing, plot, and prose are all commendable, it's Draper's eye for detail, and his dialogue, which crackles and drawls with mean-spirited slang and home-spun wisdom, that give the novel it's life.

At times Draper swings his symbolic hammer too liberally, especially in the book's title, a courtroom scene late in the book, and Sonny Hope's name. His top-notch crime reporter, Sissy Shipman, exists as one of the novel's only straight shooters. Regardless of these minor flaws, Hadrian's Walls is an excellent book. Draper uses fiction to call attention to an increasingly troublesome social problem the business of incarceration but wisely refrains from turning his book into an ideological jag.

The faint of heart reader may do well to stay away, but if you can handle this tough world, Draper's powerful examination of friendship, obligation, and freedom will not disappoint.

Mark Luce sits on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

With the publication of Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Annie Proulx has become an authentic western writer. Previously acclaimed for her three novels, The Shipping News, Post Cards and Accordion Crimes, and first story collection, Heart Songs, Proulx now turns her talented sights on a fresh subject—the so-called New West.

These 11 stories (really 10, plus a fragment, "55 Miles to the Gas Pump"), are extraordinary. They occur in the lonely, wind-swept, austerely beautiful high plains of Wyoming. To this realistic setting Proulx adds humor, a large dose of empathy and elements of the gothic and fantastic—as in the already celebrated opening story, "The Half-Skinned Steer," which John Updike has included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. (Close Range also includes the first cowboy story I know of that is overtly homosexual, the O. Henry Award-winning "Brokeback Mountain," which concludes the book.) The result is a thoroughly satisfying blend, somewhat like a mixture of Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy.

Making a living in Proulx's Wyoming is a tough undertaking. Consider Diamond Felts, a hapless bull rider on the rodeo circuit in "The Mud Below." Another character tells him, "You rodeo, you're a rooster on Tuesday, a feather duster on Wednesday." Diamond's failures cause him to conclude of life in general that it was all a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud.

Proulx's women are also stoic and long-suffering, although they sometimes soften their condition with fatalistic humor. In the marvelous "A Lonely Coast," the book's only first-person narrative, a group of female friends suffer from and put up with more spousal aberrations than they might if they lived elsewhere and had more options. But, the narrator wryly acknowledges, "there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle." Wyoming is our ninth largest state, but has the fewest people. Proulx's narrator explains that if you don't live here, you can't think how lonesome it gets.

James Grinnell lives in Dekalb, Illinois.