PALACE THIEF by Ethan Canin (Picador:...

PALACE THIEF by Ethan Canin (Picador: $10; 205 pp.) Canin’s exceptionally well-crafted short stories depict characters who slog through their daily grind until flashes of insight illuminate their drab lives. The narrator of “Accountant” sums up the tone of this highly readable anthology when he reflects: “I was seized, as I sometimes am, with sadness. I suppose I was wondering, although it is strange for me to admit it, why, of all the lives that might have been mine, I have led the one I have just described.” In “Batorsag and Szerelem,” a bright high school student watches his brilliant, eccentric brother rise in academic circles and plummet in their parents’ esteem. A father learns about his own needs and how to express them from his sensitive son in “City of Broken Hearts.”