5 Short Story Gems

By Lev Grossman, Rebecca Myers

LOOKING FOR JAKE

CHINA MIEVILLE

There's something unnerving about Mieville's writing. In fact there's everything unnerving about it. Mieville just doesn't respect boundaries: the supernatural flows into the everyday, the dead return to life, the past intrudes into the present, human bodies combine with machines. In the opening story London has been transmogrified into a surreal, deadly jungle through which a forlorn lover pursues the titular Jake. In Reports of Certain Events in London, a man uncovers documents detailing a secret war being fought over time and space. The combatants in this war are, literally, city streets. Get it about the boundaries? This is the oozing, dripping, cutting edge of contemporary fantasy. --By Lev Grossman

TOOTH AND CLAW

T.C. BOYLE

The prolific Boyle (author of 10 novels and six previous short-story collections) returns to mercilessly test his characters' physical and emotional endurance. Lester, a young bartender, experiences "wrecks both literal and figurative, replete with flames, blood, crushed metal and broken hearts." He isn't alone. In other stories, a radio DJ must survive 12 days without sleep for a p.r. promotion and a couple is trapped in a crotch-high snowdrift on a back mountain road. The gratification comes as each, captured in Boyle's calculating and caustic prose, fights his or her way out of the wreckage. --By Rebecca Myers

MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS

KELLY LINK

"It has been only in the last two decades that the living have been in the habit of marrying the dead," writes Link in The Great Divorce. One of current fiction's little-known treasures, she spins her stories in such charming, matter-of-fact tones that you almost don't realize you're entering a hybrid world that's part Muggle and part magic. A love-befuddled boy talks to a character from his favorite TV show on the phone. A late-night convenience store is visited by zombies who refuse to buy anything. An entire village pulls up stakes and moves itself inside a handbag made of the skin of a dog. Link casts her spells like an expert; these tales are far darker, crueler and sadder than their premises suggest. --L.G.

THE TURNING

TIM WINTON

It's difficult to imagine that teenagers living in a place filled with swamp snakes, blue-tongue lizards and wobbegongs (carpet sharks) would still experience itchy adolescent ennui: the desire for something--anything--to happen. But that's exactly what Winton deftly captures in his linked collection, set in the hardscrabble whaling town of Angelus, in Western Australia. We follow Vic, the most developed of the characters in the book, as he confronts the quagmire of family, the bitterness of pride, his own prickly regrets and the impossible, inescapable Australian landscape. It turns out he has more to fear from the dangers lurking within himself than anything found in the bush. --R.M.

WILLFUL CREATURES

AIMEE BENDER

Whimsical and yet elegantly stark, Bender's narratives resonate like fables. A man encounters a colony of pocket-size people living alongside humans. A woman harvests children from a crop of potatoes. A boy born with keys on his hands instead of fingers spends his life looking for things (doors, security boxes, women) to unlock. Bender ensnares you with an enticing opening line--"The pumpkinhead couple got married"--and confidently leads you into her phantasmagoric realm from there. Thankfully she stops short of fairy-tale morals; in their place we're given sublime studies on sorrow, grief, kindness and love. --R.M.