<i> Fair Augusto and Other Stories by Laura Kalpakian (Graywolf: $8, paperback; 250 pp.)</i>

In two of the stories in this first collection by Laura Kalpakian, the main characters are from small, neighboring towns set deep in the desolate California desert. The towns are called Chagrin, and St. Elmo, the same places that appeared in her 1985 novel, “These Latter Days.” In the names of these barren towns, originally settled and still dominated by Mormons, are the keys to her fiction.

Chagrin, that state of disquietude or distress of mind caused by humiliation, disappointment or failure, is endemic to her tales. It’s the most commonly shared quality of Kalpakian’s characters. Yet, like the atmospheric wonders named after St. Elmo, the patron saint of sailors, beautiful and remarkable phenomena occur around these people. During St. Elmo’s Fire, flamelike apparitions are seen in stormy weather at prominent points on a ship, and also on land at the tops of trees or steeples. Similarly electrifying things happen to the people in these stories: They gain sudden, remarkable flashes of insight--not always happily--and as a result, slip their burdens and experience what Kalpakian calls “those ineffable moments when the tangible world seems resonant, yeasty with significance all out of proportion to its mundane, visible merits.”

A teen-age daughter learns of her father’s philandering in “Last Dream Before Waking,” and the disquietude and anger are oddly and beautifully balanced by the family’s arrival at a Scottish Inn, which is the perfect home the girl has always dreamed of. In “Bare Root Season,” a mother’s fierce, protective love for an adult, but wayward, daughter is the cause of a deep rift between herself and her husband. When the mother sends the daughter money, the husband retaliates by attacking her garden, and in a flash of loathing, she says aloud to her beheaded roses and mutilated camellias, “If I’d only known, I could have saved so much time.”

“The Land of Lucky Strike” is a lovely, often funny account of how foreigners--in this case Armenian emigrants newly arrived in Los Angeles in 1924--attempt to adjust to American culture. Dikran and his pregnant wife are instructed by a zealous cousin, who also finds Dikran work selling cigarettes and candy out of a tiny shack at the beach. It ends: “Leaning over his wife, he kissed her mouth tenderly. He laid his ear on her swollen belly and listened to the heartbeat of the unborn American child.” You know this child will be born fully formed to a civilization and will escape the steady, tedious and often humiliating acclimation of its parents. The story works because of the disjunction between self-identity and the New World.

Kalpakian’s strength is her ability to write in many different voices. She chooses the side of the downtrodden. Middle-class problems don’t seem to interest her much. Her sympathies lie with the deserted wife, the sister of a criminal, a cuckolded husband, the prim and unadventuresome secretary in an insurance firm, or the young girl “bursting through childhood’s frame” to become a lonely, unhappy woman.

The weakest stories reflect Kalpakian’s attempts to fictionalize the sort of place and culture she might have grown up in--those small desert towns, just beyond the boundaries of Zion, still dominated by Mormons. The Mormons she portrays are stereotypical, a fault exacerbated by the fact that the stories take place in the early part of the century. They have the moralizing tone of “Little House on the Prairie.” Prim, saintlike people pass judgment on cigar-smoking heathens. There’s much to say about the Mormon culture: It’s as American as an Alan Ladd movie, or a Taco Bell, a real native product. But Kalpakian doesn’t say it, she has yet to tap the true, complex sources of such experience.

As a whole, the collection is wonderful, a rich and mature work, marked by signs of a real writer’s gift. The author owes nothing to current trends. By ignoring the fashion for terse, minimalist fiction, Kalpakian remains true to her vision. The product of this vision is a book of highly accomplished stories.