The Zebra Storyteller: Collected Stories

Holst has long been treasured in the underground New York literary scene. His impish delivery is filled with a childlike delight in tale-spinning, and yet his work is recognized for its inscrutable mysteries. Containing every story Holst has ever written, nearly a third of them never before published, this collection should establish Holst's reputation among a wider public. If there is a single aesthetic preoccupation in these tales, it is with storytelling itself. In the title piece, a Siamese cat speaks ``Zebraic,'' bewitching zebras so that he is able to kill them, until he meets the zebra storyteller who has already imagined a Siamese cat speaking Zebraic. This allows him to kill the cat, and ``that is the function of the storyteller,'' Holst concludes. Such postmodern concerns, however, do not become boorish. Above all, Holst seeks to entertain, not lecture; imagination and language receive no especial privilege here, but humor always does. In ``The Language of Cats,'' at the end of one rather long and unsuccessful attempt to describe a confused state of mind, the narrator resorts to: ``imagine how the world would appear to a person after finishing such a ridiculously lengthy, pointless sentence.'' Such authorial winks give a hint of what it is like to be in the presence of this master of the told tale. (Aug.)