"Deft" is one of those adjectives you frequently see bandied about in blurbs on the back of short story collections, and with good reason: it's vital that short fiction have that blend of skill and elegance. A novel can be a looser, rangy thing, and a novelist can ease up and paint big broad strokes for pages at a time, while the limitations of the form mean that a short story writer must wield a finer brush. The problem with short fiction, though, for a committed novel-lover like myself, is the almost claustrophobic feeling all those teeny brushstrokes can create. For me, finding a story collection like Robert Anderson's "Ice Age" was like rounding a corner in a museum and coming upon a roomful of Edward Hoppers. I was filled with a delightfully alternating current of strangeness and familiarity, and knew I was in the hands of an artist whose intelligence and yes, deftness, thrilled me.

The 10 more-than-slightly absurd stories that make up "Ice Age" range all over the globe in setting, from New York in the 1960s to Rome, to Spain, Texas, Los Angeles and a Gulf War field hospital, and Anderson mixes both wholly created characters and familiar figures from the real world. Thus we are plunked into the mind of Norman Mailer on the legendary night he stabbed his wife, Adele. Or we spend a lonely evening in a hotel suite in Rome with Leonard Bernstein while he ponders a message sent to him by a saint. Or ride with the recently dead Jimi Hendrix on his journey to the underworld of L.A. It is a testament to Anderson's skill that these real people become true characters in his work, not caricatures. Mailer has certainly spent a lifetime self-advertising and has never seemed in need of an agency to get the job done, but filtered though Anderson's sensibility -- a voice that can describe a West Coast hipster's accent as "a variation on that early hour jazz DJ who utters 'Brubeck' with a stuttered lick like brush against drumhide" -- the posturing blowhard becomes understandably human. And when Anderson turns away from the celebrities to write about a Texas family who bring in extra cash by running a potter's field in their backyard, he carries with him that same knowing surety that makes the absurd seem like the everyday.

Not everything in "Ice Age" works -- a long monologue by a low-level mobster's wife seems jarringly contrived -- but such moments are exceptions in what is an otherwise exceptional debut.

--Edward Neuert

Assorted Fire Events
By David Means
Context, 182 pages

Just about halfway through this collection of pristine stories, David Means begins a new one by writing, "I don't want anyone to die in my stories anymore." The story that follows, "What I Hope For," no more than a page and a half long, describes a nameless couple enjoying an idyll at a bed and breakfast, potpourri and all. It's a bit dull, and yet a fairly funny joke, for Means is proving to his readers that death and grief are his beat, what he does best. Simple happiness doesn't bring out the best in him. If his stories leave us in a state of melancholy, feeling the slightly sweet ache of wounds that will never heal, who are we to complain that they lack uplift?

A few of the stories here experiment with form -- a man's mind flickers back and forth between the adulterous affair he's consummating and memories of his brother's death by drowning; various endings are offered for the fate of a bereaved businessman who stumbles down some rural train tracks and into the clutches of a gang of violent outcasts; a series of paragraphs illustrates the beauty and horror of fire -- but none of these stories are cryptic, or even hard to follow. Clarity, in addition to an abiding preoccupation with catastrophic loss, is a signal trait of Mean's fiction. When he abandons the paved paths of storytelling, it's always to track down the nature and workings of emotion. Wherever he follows it, this is the kind of moment he seeks: "You drive up to it stunned and bent over with anguish at the very central fact that what was once around your life -- objects of so-called sentimental attachment -- is now ash."

A builder barely registers his own complicity in a shoddy construction that costs a little girl her life, while her mother suffers unearned guilt. The brief disappearance of a friend reminds a young man of a dead schoolmate he might have been kind to, but instead tormented. A hungry homeless man intrudes on a wedding that celebrates the launch of a doomed marriage. A widow discourages a suitor by showing him a videotape of herself making love to her husband. A man who collects memories of "pure gestures" runs over a movie camera when he learns that the particularly fine gesture he just witnessed has in fact been faked. Despite their contemporary setting, Means' stories have an elemental quality with echoes (some more explicit than others) of Greek myth and tragedy. Like those ancient works, they're not comforting in any obvious way, but to the patient, attentive reader they bring a deep, enriching sense of the gravity of life.

--Laura Miller

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"