DISCOVERIES

COLLECTED STORIES By Ellen Gilchrist; Little, Brown: 512 pp., $27.95

“A full moon was caught like a kite in the pecan trees across the river.” Mysterious, beautiful, ominous, rich, perfect. “The low-hanging clouds pushed against each other in fat cosmic orgasms.” Heavy-handed, jarring, distracting, mixed beyond usefulness. This is why you buy short-story collections by writers you’ve enjoyed: to see the many variations in their writing to get a sense of their evolution sometimes over decades, to boil their writing down to a haiku of questions they’ve asked in various ways and answers they’ve offered. Also to discover new things. Reading this collection of stories handpicked by Ellen Gilchrist, I was struck by the power of her last lines, the way she builds on readers’ expectations and then shatters them, sometimes violently, in the very end. She is also one of the finest writers of a rare species: the happy story. Gilchrist is not afraid of deep happiness, family happiness in spite of problems, love happiness as ordained by fate and the gods, or the happiness of children, even lonely or mistreated children. Some of her characters (like Nora Jane from the previous collection, “Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle”) can suck the happiness from the ash heaps of poverty, infidelity, depression, turning their lives around to include deep friendship and babies and angels and forests. If they can do it, well, you follow my line of thought.

THE VINTAGE BOOK OF LATIN AMERICAN STORIES Edited by Carlos Fuentes and Julio Ortega; Vintage Books: 380 pp., $14 paper

Movies these days are often about being trapped in the reality the protagonist has spun himself: suburbia, wealth, badness, even age. They do something brave and heroic and creative to change that reality. Reading this collection of Latin American short stories, from the early 1900s to today, from Havana to Uruguay, can have a similar effect. You don’t have to blow anything up or leave the marriage to see how plastic reality can be. Carlos Fuentes and Julio Ortega have chosen a wild cross-section of stories, by turns exquisite, cruel, incandescent and ripe. The collection begins with Borges’ “The Aleph,” arguably the most primal and essential of all short stories. It includes “The Stroke of Midnight” by Jose Balza, perhaps the sexiest story ever written about making love to make babies; and smelliest story, “House of Passion,” by Nelida Pinon. Rules lie broken all around this collection. Most of the stories drag a reader into their lair by the short hairs, with little time for introductions. “It is here,” Borges writes in “The Aleph,” “that a writer’s hopelessness begins. . . . What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive.” Many of these stories transcend this ancient problem.

LONG DISTANCE A Year of Living Strenuously By Bill McKibben; Simon & Schuster: 192 pp., $23

Bill McKibben’s gaze, his focus, has always had a worrisome intensity. He’ll carry an idea like a football to the 100-yard line, dragging disbelievers and the converted along with him. In this book about a year of training for Nordic ski racing, McKibben is tackled by addiction (to exercise), vanity, failure and finally his father’s death. “I’d started this exercise of exercising in an effort to try on a new identity,” he writes. He discovers, from watching his father die and from grueling, obsessive workouts, that identity is a “solid thing . . . the same on a ski trail and in front of a keyboard and on my knees in church. Three-quarters of the way there in everything I did.” Racing is the only effort he makes during which he is 100% present. “Long Distance” is, McKibben admits, an “odd project,” but one that adds a whole dimension to the articles so many of us read in Outside magazine, or any of the sports, fitness, adventure magazines that glitter on the dreamy margins of our everyday lives. It gives a nudge to the reader in other areas as well: How much do you give? Do you have another 45 seconds in you?

PINOCHET AND ME By Marc Cooper; Verso: 144 pp., $22

Marc Cooper went to Chile in 1971. He was 20. When Salvador Allende became “the first freely elected Marxist head of state,” Cooper was hired as President Allende’s translator. He stayed 27 months, until Gen. Augusto Pinochet, standing on the shoulders of the CIA and the Nixon administration, took over the government in 1973. During that coup, Cooper’s apartment was ransacked and his passport stolen. “My only prospect for joy,” he writes of his departure on a U.N. flight for refugees, “was to flee the slaughterhouse of my friends.” Why write this 25 years later? Because Cooper can still feel the ground trembling beneath the feet of the Chileans. “No organism,” he writes of Chile’s future, “is ever really healed until the illness is identified, isolated and expunged.”