FIRST FICTION

THE HISTORY OF OUR WORLD BEYOND THE WAVE. By R. E. Klein (Harcourt Brace: 224 pp., $22)

On the first day of summer, Paul Sant, a Southern California English professor, heads to the beach, rents a surf mat and witnesses the end of the world. A tidal wave crashes ashore, and Sant finds himself floating on a limitless sea. His ensuing odyssey takes him to tiny islands that were once mountain peaks and are now inhabited by creatures both familiar and strange (crabs with human heads, fiendish amphibious humanoids he calls “gugs”). There are the heartily avuncular mountaineer Hiram Bell, who shares with Sant his 10-pound bag of Cavendish tobacco, his bottle of Imperial Tokay and a “snug breakfast” of trout and potatoes; an intrepid trio made up of a waitress from New York, a retired engineer and a helicopter pilot from Scranton, Penn.; and Donk Radlitt, a cowboy who enjoys Sant’s tutelage in Shakespeare and Milton.

After a series of scrapes with gugs, whirlpools and terrifying medieval visions, Paul alights on a shore where other post-apocalyptic island hoppers have begun to create a new human community. Yet even as it forms, the town of Grant (named after Ulysses S.) is threatened by the very forces that made civilization so overrated in the first place. Klein’s spirit of adventure is contagious in this first-rate post-deluge tall tale.

THE BRIDEGROOM WAS A DOG. By Yoko Tawada (Kodansha: 166 pp., $19)

Tawada, who won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize for outstanding literary achievement in 1993, makes her American debut with the three curious stories contained here. In “The Bridegroom Was a Dog,” Mitsuko Kitamura is a comely schoolteacher who gets all the moms talking. She assures her pupils that using a Kleenex feels much better the second and third times around, and she tells an eyebrow-raising fable about a princess and a black dog who licks her bottom. Miss Kitamura is too pretty to invite anything more than fleeting suspicions from the community, but that begins to change when her new boyfriend, Taro--a silent, dog-like man--moves in with her.

In “Missing Heels,” a mail-order bride arrives in a faceless European city only to find that her husband won’t come out of his room. To learn about the customs of this perplexing society, she hires a tutor who sternly informs her that “the average length of time spent in the shower is two minutes and 17 seconds.”

In “The Gotthard Railway,” a woman prefers the darkness of a Swiss railroad tunnel to the aesthetic stimulations of the Italian sunshine. Like the headstrong traveler of this story, Tawada has an outsider’s keen eye and a refreshing appetite for mischief.

STORIES FROM THE TUBE. By Matthew Sharpe (Villard: 224 pp., $22)

A power couple shacks up in an Arctic motel after the husband wets himself and becomes paralyzed at a gala fund-raiser; a mother’s care for her 10-year-old son exceeds the administration of chicken soup as she performs a series of increasingly risky surgeries and decides to “blow the family nest egg on a cut-rate CT scanner”; two twentysomething women become bridesmaids for the 19th time and find themselves competing for the attentions of a wedding guest who resembles Rasputin; a woman constrained by bourgeois New York unexpectedly turns into Marilyn Monroe at an art-house matinee of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and becomes a soothsayer to a parade of oddballs; a grandmother with terminal cancer moves in with her 13-year-old grandson, who accompanies her on missions to score dime bags of marijuana in Washington Square: The scenarios that spin out of these 10 stories are as unlikely as they are familiar, perhaps because each one of them is inspired by a television commercial. Like that dreaded and debased form, Sharpe’s stories are wildly effective--and often touching--collisions of the banal and the surreal.

BILLY DEAD. By Lisa Reardon (Viking: 260 pp., $22)

“Those Johnsons always been trash.” That’s what teenager Ray Johnson imagines everyone saying when they find out (and they do) that he’s been sleeping with Jean. Jean is Ray’s younger sister, but Jean and Ray’s relationship is the least trashy thing about the Johnson family--and, perhaps, the least criminal thing that happens in this brutal yet moving novel. Now, 10 years later, their older brother Billy is found murdered along a Michigan roadside, forcing Ray to confront the small town whose judgment he dreads and, once again, his buried love for Jean. Billy was a violent boozer who, as a boy, forced unsavory interactions upon young Jean out in the garage. It’s no surprise that someone would want Billy dead but, as Ray says, “Whoever got him must have been meaner than him. Only one person I know like that.” Still, that one person could be any number of suspects: Ray’s philandering and abusive father, now a hermit; Billy’s rabidly defensive wife, Ginny Honey; the impulsive and fearless Jean; and even Ray himself, prone to hallucinations and the occasional restorative self-mutilation. Reardon’s tour of upstate Michigan may not be scenic, but it’s not soon forgotten.

ZACHARY’S WINGS. By Rosemarie Robotham (Scribner: 284 pp., $22)

This is an unabashed love story which, though long on “heady cologne” and “skin glistening with almond oil,” moves with undeniable momentum, much like its unlikely lovers, Korie Morgan and Zachary Piper, who collide here. Korie is a reporter on a New York photo magazine. West Indian by birth and Ivy League by will, she is the kind of intellectual beauty who tends not to settle for a high school dropout and social worker. But Zach is no clock-puncher; he’s a natural caretaker who loses himself in the task of other people’s well-being, whether it’s a mentally handicapped couple looking to raise a child or his mother, Florida, trying to maintain the Piper home in Philadelphia. Their love affair gets off the ground in a hurry but, inevitably, storm clouds gather. Korie has not divorced her first husband, Sam, whose nasty bout with the flu is soon diagnosed as terminal lymphoma and, later, as AIDS. As Korie enters a maze of pot, Chablis and cocaine and Zach grapples with family crises, all seems lost--until a chance encounter at a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike.