DISCOVERIES

The Last Communist Virgin

Stories

Wang Ping

Coffee House Press: 218 pp., $14.95 paper

“AT your grave I wait. When the hot wind blows from the North Pole, the sea will rise like mountains, shattering every chain on the river’s throat and limbs. And you, my mountain spirit, will come home in your original form, free, naked.” These seven stories by Wang Ping, raised on an island in the East China Sea, are full of ghosts that haunt her alienated, often homesick characters. In the title story, Wan Li, a student in New York, crippled by a lack of self-esteem, is victimized by an elderly Japanese man who offers her shelter, and a cocky boyfriend she thinks she loves. Many of Wang’s characters are (like Wang) children of the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards’ sloganeering, the public humiliation, the generational rifts wrack the characters in these tales, including the sisters separated by bourgeois friends in “Where the Poppies Blow” and the sturgeon gods in “Maverick,” whose lives weave through the “dark chaos.”

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Sweet Promised Land

Robert Laxalt

University of Nevada Press: 208 pp., $29.95

“SWEET Promised Land” is the story of the journey of Robert Laxalt’s father, Dominique, from the French Pyrenees at 16 to start a new life as a sheepherder in Nevada -- and the story of his journey home 47 years later, to the village where he was born. The book, much loved by the Basque American population of the American West, was originally published in 1957. From the first sentence (“My father was a sheepherder, and his home was the hills”), you know you’re in the hands of a writer who captures place and time with radiant elegance. Dominique, buying a Stetson in Reno, visiting his wife’s family in Bordeaux, where he was still considered one of the “wild and foolish boys of the high Pyrenees,” emerges with almost mythic clarity: “We were among the last whose names would tell our blood ... ,” Laxalt writes, “to know another language in our homes, to suffer youthful shame because of that language and refuse to speak it.... And the irony of it was that our mothers and fathers were truer Americans than we, because they had forsaken home and family, and gone into the unknown....”

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Seizure

A Novel

Erica Wagner

W.W. Norton: 224 pp., $23.95

WHEN Janet, raised by her father, learns that she has inherited a house (a stone cottage by the sea) from her mother, she begins a long and frightening journey back through the thicket of lies that is her true inheritance. At the cottage, she finds Tom, raised by his storytelling mother, and falls in love. It is hard to identify the source of fear in the novel, a fear that seems etched into the rocky coastline and bred into the blackberries. In the end, it is love abandoned, postponed, betrayed, that propels the walking dead in “Seizure.” Erica Wagner writes a bit like Jennifer Egan, a bit like Joanna Scott, but it is a unique voice in its rhythm and syntax: “Wind blown through a door.... The wind makes no footstep, but still the wind must walk through the world. Neither of them hears his step, though it must have been what she is waiting for.”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com