North & South

King (Separate Parts) attended the fabled Black Mountain College in the mid-1950s: her short stories suggest the spare hardness and amused diffidence of Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley; wrenching plot twists and the instability of narrative itself-King often interrupts to discard or evaluate the proceedings-root her best work in the postmodern contingency forged by Black Mountain teacher John Cage. In ""Conversation in Connecticut,"" the entire arc of a failed novelist's life gets condensed into a single revelation. ""Dog Box"" moves its focus violently inward from a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood to a box on an art dealer's mantle. The collection's second half has one foot in the courtly landscape of the Old South (where King grew up), the other itching to escape to an ""arts underworld."" The narrators, often unnamed and female, reveal King's keen sensitivity to the caste system separating men and women, a; la Tillie Olsen. King is more interested in demolishing notions of character in fiction than in character itself (although she's good at repulsive guys, young and old). These stories form the pinned edges of a very broad canvas.