MY DATE WITH SATAN By Stacey Richter; Scribner: 224 pp., $22

This collection of stories reminds me of “The Fantastic Voyage”: a sci-fi spaceship that takes you inside the human body to the molten core of her blustery teens and 20-year-olds who act like they know everything just to survive but carry some earnest kindness or need inside of them. In Stacey Richter’s vision of the future, we won’t rely on things like clothes and money or even other people (parents or boyfriends or society) to tell us who we are. Take, for example, the bad-ass member of the Goth Metal Band, Lords of Sludge, in “Goal 666” who talks the talk of a good Satan worshiper. Where would I be without the band, he wonders, I’d be a clerk in a copy shop. By the end of the story, he’s singing Rogers and Hammerstein and Karen Carpenter, and all the loathing and resentment I’d been nursing at least since I was a sophomore in high school had burst like a soap bubble. In my favorite story, “An Island of Boyfriends,” a girl, who has gone on a cruise to get away from it all, is shipwrecked on an island of men. She takes her fill, finds they can’t make her happy and becomes the island hermit. “There was a whole tribe of guys living there, living in huts in a clearing, she thinks when she first finds them. I gotta say, they were really cute. In the past, when I met guys from other cultures or whatever, they just looked wrong. European guys don’t bathe, wear embarrassing bikini underwear, and seem sort of gay; Canadian guys bathe all the time and look really, really gay. But these guys seemed totally normal.” The best thing about these stories is that they are funny. The second best thing is watching Richter’s characters dream of places where they can be happy: “I know I belong somewhere else,” thinks the boy prophet in “A Prodigy of Longing,” “in a place where there are others like me. . . . Everything will be made of one thing, and love will be safe.” Can we go there now?*

THE WOMAN WHO CUT OFF HER LEG AT THE MAIDSTONE CLUB By Julia Slavin; Henry Holt: 194 pp., $22

I like Julia Slavin’s collection of stories because they bubble up out of a quietly desperate, normalized insanity that has a brave tradition in literature (somewhere between John Updike and Dada). This brand of surrealism seems a marketable antidote to civilization, and these stories, well, they’re gaseous. Characters do and say things that transcend the level of mere faux pas as if they are unable to help themselves. Not being able to help it usually indicates breakdown. Breakdown paves the way for change. And change, well, I hear it’s good. Take the housewife who swallows the adorable guy mowing her lawn. She starts out kissing him and in her desperate need swallows him whole. Can you relate? Or the yuppie couple who hire a baby-proofing company that empties and rubberizes the house, cuts down the trees and evicts the father. There’s the pudding the angry couple throw on the floor that hardens and remains. There’s the baby blanket the grown man can’t shake that ruins all his sexual encounters (also familiar?). And there is the woman who cuts off her leg at a posh club in the Hamptons. Each story brings a sigh of relief. In the future, we won’t repress so much and get so unhappy that we have to do extreme things; am I right?*

HOLDFAST, At Home in the Natural World By Kathleen Dean Moore; The Lyons Press: 176 pp., $20

Kathleen Moore teaches philosophy at Oregon State University. She doesn’t seem to have any problem staying alive and awake and, like fast-running water, these essays on nature and human nature convey this. In “A Field Guide to Western Birds,” Moore tries to figures out why her teenage son loves field guides so much, reading them cover to cover. “It’s an image, a drawing, length and a wingspan,” he tells her. “A picture in your mind. But all the time you think, maybe someday I will see that really. And then, someday, you do. And what was just an idea, it comes true. Like a wish.” The we, the our, the us in Moore’s writing are capacious. They include owls, the bears she is so afraid of, water, her daughter ill from a degenerative disease, her husband, night.*

CRAZY FOR RIVERS by Bill Barich; The Lyons Press: 80 pp., $16.95

He describes his obsession as something that came over him one autumn. But one suspects that his love for fishing came over him most autumns in his life. And spring and probably summer, too. Wintertime he most likely writes for The New Yorker and a novel here and there. In this confession, Bill Barich fishes the western rivers: the Merced, the Stanislaus, the Kings, the North Yuba and the Downie. Midlife revelations are kept to a minimum, but they pop up in between fishing trips: “My life at 45,” he writes, “right on the money, felt constricted and compromised, and I had trouble staying inside my own skin.” His marriage collapses. He mentions his aging father. He writes of fishing with his old friend Rob Royer, who is similarly obsessed. Set like gems in the context of a lifelong love, these relationships, so briefly mentioned, take on a glimmer, facets and depth that might not hold up under longer scrutiny. One day on the North Yuba, Barich realizes that fishing had fled his mind entirely. He remembers when he was a novice and the world still looked shiny in every corner. He thinks about letting go and wonders if life isn’t, in the end, all catch and release, a flow whose essence we can never truly grasp.*