Wit and wisdom: short stories by a master and novels by a variety of writers take us on odd journeys.

* Damned If I Do by Percival Everett Graywolf Press, November 2004 $15, ISBN 1-555-97411-2

If Percival Everett were a rap star, the industry mags would say he has produced a string of hits, maybe not in sales but creatively and artistically. After critically successful books such as Erasure (Hyperion, 2002), Glyph (Graywolf, 1999), Watershed (Beacon, 2003), and American Desert (Hyperion, 2004), it was time for the wizard of wit and irony to create an excellent collection of a dozen ingenious and humorous short stories, Damned If I Do, capable of mesmerizing the reader.

Everett, a professor of English at the University of Southern California, does not employ any sophisticated or convoluted language or symbolic meanings. The words are there on the page, unadorned, brave, funny or sad, witty or ironic. He is a master storyteller, skilled in drawing the reader into the slightly askew literary landscape, dispensing wisdom on one hand or winking in a satirical mood at a character or a situation in the other.

Take the opening story, "The Fix," a lulu of a fantasy where a stranger is employed at a sandwich shop and proceeds to fix everything from broken hearts and broken machinery to broken bodies and broken lives, until he is in such great demand that he ponders suicide. In "House," two residents in a mental facility debate the realm of insanity and what passes for fantasy and reality. Everett creates such madness and mayhem in this temple of chaos as he penetrates the confused vision of these hapless souls. In another story, "True Romance," an isolated romance writer, thought to be a pot grower, has settled in a remote area where he can conjure up his private myths.

Three of Everett's favorite subjects are race, identity and culture, usually addressed thematically in waves of ideas and conflicts. Like his topsy-turvy story "The Appropriation of Cultures," the author turns the subject of the dreaded Confederate flag on its head when a black man, who plays guitar, purchases a truck owned by a redneck, complete with a rebel decal. It starts a trend among blacks who begin to purchase Confederate flags and buttons.

Everett zeroes in on the occasional futility of life in his fabulist yarn, "Epigenesis," where noted researcher Alan Turing is speaking to a trout: "It's life, too, you know. It's this day-to-day stuff. I don't know why I do anything. I do my research but it's for shit. I read the news and it goes in one eye and out the other. I haven't heard a good joke in years...."

This is Everett at his best, conjuring up visions and images to bewitch the reader. If this small sampling of his impressive work suits your fancy, read any one of his fine books, He will surprise you!

Robert Fleming is the author of Havoc After Dark: Tales of Terror (Dafina Books, March 2004).