There are nevertheless enough stories of high calibre to recommend this volume, and many are, indeed, innovative in form and audacious in their conceptual and emotional territory. Particularly impressive are those stories that deal with cross-cultural experience; without exception, these works are multi-layered, structurally fractured and bear a satisfying thematic complexity. The two ‘Japanese stories’, Paddy O’ Reilly’s ‘Distance Runner’ and Creed O’Hanlon’s ‘Like a Christmas Cake’, are nuanced with astute and circumspect cultural knowledge, and both express a lovely, alienated melancholy. ‘Distance Runner’ has a sense of restraint rare in Australian lyrical writing. Joanna Kujawa’s ‘Dreaming Havana’ is another complex travel narrative – highly intelligent writing which considers the textualised encounter with Cuba (Hemingway, Simone and Sartre, Che and Fidel) as a basis for touristic idealisation, projection and introjection. I first read this story in HEAT and am delighted to see it reproduced here, one of only two texts elsewhere published. ‘The Hammam’, by Tiffany Barton, is also deeply engaging, dealing as it does with the fraught topic of Arab–Western relations and the ambivalence that pervades imagining of otherness. It is a beautifully poised story, redolent with sexual tension.

Mention must also be made of ‘Siege’, a ‘diary’ of the siege of Sarajevo, by Amra Pajalic, a powerful and moving story of family dissolution and the suffering, deprivation and terror of war. That such a work should appear in a collection of ‘Best Australian Stories’ indicates the internationalism of the literary culture we now possess and inhabit. ‘The President’s Bodyguard’, by Alejandra Martinez, is similarly excursive: it tells of the pathos and desire of migrancy in a small encounter in a café. It is a story of solidarity, finely crafted, understated and original. The drama of identification and disidentification is also the basis of Carla Sari’s cleverly wry story ‘Conversation’, set in Venice. In this cluster, I wish to mention Jena Woodhouse’s ‘Reading Rilke’, a cross-cultural narrative in the subtlest terms, since it speaks of language, translation and memory. An old German woman is teaching her language to a younger Russian man, and the encounter leads her back to her own memories when she is encouraged to read Rilke aloud. A study in the relation of language and identity, ‘Reading Rilke’ is also a persuasive story about the redemptive power of poetry.

Among the narratives set in Australia, several work at an emotional register of compelling honesty. ‘The Bird in the Egg’, by Steve Holden, is a splendid story, tracking the grief experienced by a man after the murder of his wife and child. There is nothing typical of ‘crime fiction’ here, but a densely realised exploration of grief that rehearses ‘the point and pointlessness of things’. The ending to the story – a man standing alone at night in his backyard, recalling a desolating trip to the cemetery – is a passage of astonishingly accomplished writing. Likewise, Paul Mitchell’s skilfully told ‘Inside the Shell’, which examines the aftermath of a suicide, is a story of almost unbearable waste and loneliness. The third outstanding story in this cluster is Erin Gough’s ‘Jump’: ‘Like a fever breaking. Like being shaken awake. It’s the moment of whiplash in a car crash …’ Gough is describing the experience of jumping from a bridge at night. In one of the most original stories in the collection, she tells of a friendship – if it could be called that – based on risk, transgression and compulsive attachment to danger. This is a scary story, brilliantly realised, and one of almost allegorical power.

In his universalising pronouncements on the classification of short stories, William Boyd forgets to mention the fabulous. Delia Falconer’s elegant, studied vision of ‘Hadrian in Hell’ (the emperor’s architectural megalomania of the Tiburtina Villa, which included a waterworks version of the Lethe) is almost anomalous in this volume, marked as it is by sumptuous baroque imagining and a high-stylist discipline. Nathan Besser’s ‘Letter to the Drowned’ derives from more familiar magical realist territory; written in the second person, it has an uncanny feel. After grief the ocean begins to rise, eventually engulfing the house and drowning the bereaved. In ‘Fortune’, by Jamiee Edwards, an eleven-year-old sprouts her dead grandmother’s breasts. Each of these stories is a dreamy, slow revelation.

In a review, it is impossible to mention all stories in a volume. There are fine pieces dealing with sexuality, estranged marriage and sexual politics. There is also a reprisal by J.M. Coetzee of his curmudgeonly and complex Melburnian, Elizabeth Costello. The last story in the volume, however, is a genuine surprise. Many will know the poetry of Graeme Kinross-Smith; this volume includes two of his stories. The second, ‘Where Here Is’, combines the imagistic precision and sense of mystery that is characteristic of his poetry. In a deeply meditative way, it reflects, free-form, on the interpenetration of death and the present, and moves to consider ‘the sheen of rain on the road’, ‘the burst of sun’ and the ‘wine smell of sap’ that together conjure the sensations of chopping wood after rain. This story, above all, reminds us of the folly of classifications and of the necessity of acts of creative demolition; it is blithely unclassifiable and stubbornly alone and of itself.

In his prefacing ‘Memorandum’, Frank Moorhouse points out that short stories risk becoming ‘sub-economic’, and that lack of ‘economic validation’ diminishes the prestige of the form. If this is so, it is to be hoped that this volume, which takes its prestige from exploration, openness and risk, achieves the kind of success that inspires other publishers to produce collections of stories.