DISCOVERIES

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The History

of Vegas

Stories

Jodi Angel

Chronicle Books: 188 pp., $19.95

This precarious world is putty in Jodi Angel’s nimble hands. Really bad parenting lurks in the corners of most of these stark stories, the kind that makes clever survivors out of innocent children. In “Portions,” a teenager serves as substitute mother to her grossly overweight little sister, who is threatened with suspension from school if she does not show up for swim class. Rather than solve the problem in an adult way, big sister teaches her sibling the fine art of binging and purging.

In “The History of Vegas,” a 17-year-old boy is caught in the middle when his mother lures her sister away from a violent husband. In Angel’s world, children are frequently used as human shields -- white flags of purity held up as a last defense against completely sordid lives. Several stories have coffee cans filled with life savings or next month’s rent lurking in the corner. They inevitably end up empty, and not for the right reasons. Angel’s metaphors are often the only tentative details that tether her characters to the real world: “I felt Husso’s hand slide off my back like a fish sinking from the surface of a pond,” thinks a character in “Supplement. “There were clouds stacking up against the mountains and the sky had dulled.” The future, according to Jodi Angel, does not often look possible, much less bright.

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Brain Work

Stories

Michael Guista

Mariner Books: 192 pp., $12 paper

“It is pain that makes us who we are,” says the psychiatrist narrator in “Filling the Spaces Between Us.” Trouble is, many of the characters in these meticulous, fascinating stories can’t even feel pain. Michael Guista has somehow created a spectrum of emotional connectedness in these stories, and it isn’t exactly clear who’s better off.

Some of the characters can claim alcoholism, schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorders, for which they take the full range of drugs and suffer zombie-like consequences. Others lack a diagnosis, like the English professor who, just barely legally drunk, hits and kills a 3-year-old girl one night and keeps right on driving, home to his wife and children.

“There aren’t any stop-guilt pills,” he learns, “no stop-guilt talk therapy that makes any sense if you’re smart.” Paranoia, anxiety and anomie run through these stories like veins of ore, creating small tics and truly strange behaviors (like the couple who move their furniture outside after the wife has a premonition that Catholics are coming to blow the house up). No amount of science, hard as some characters try, can explain the signs of these “off-track” lives: “the drab gun-gray sweater of a little boy riding his bike; a garden hose unraveling snakelike in the front yard; the lemon tree itself, the sour taste of the fruit and the connotations of ‘lemon’ when placed alongside a noun like ‘Ford’ or ‘Hyundai.’ ”

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The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas

Stories

Davy Rothbart

Touchstone/Simon & Schuster: 166 pp., $12 paper

“Mitey-MIKE always lied big. He told marvelous lies, outlandish lies, terrible and astounding lies, sad and dangerous lies, silly lies, beautiful, exquisite and thunderous lies.... Times when truth would have sufficed, when a small lie would have done the job, he still lied big.”

Mitey-Mike is too large for this world; too large, even, for Davy Rothbart’s funny, flashy world of extreme behaviors. So too is 15-year-old Kyle, a great whirlwind of a character in this collection’s title story, a Midwestern kid with a broken arm and a dream of riding waves in Malibu.

Mini-stories spin off these characters: the sister dying of cystic fibrosis, the guy trying to impress his girlfriend as they speed Kyle to the hospital, the lie Mitey-Mike told his best friend.

Reading this collection is like being in a hall of mirrors, with doors leading from one fantastic tale (via car wrecks and collusions and impossible coincidences) to the next.