Farm on Nippersink Creek

These sensual, slow-moving stories, as placid as the small-town life they chronicle, are surprisingly satisfying, though nothing of any real interest ever seems to happen, and the narrator will sometimes make an awkward stretch to raise a smile or prove a point. Like Garrison Keillor, May--a professional storyteller and director of the Illinois Storytelling Festival--describes life as he has known it; but his work is more deliberate and elegiac, like soothing if somewhat melancholy bedtime stories. One of the 18 tales here describes waking on Sunday morning, attending mass, walking to the fish pond, then wandering across town to see a passing train pick up the mail bag. The absence of major events is precisely the point: reading one of these stories is like re-experiencing a long-gone day from childhood, one sensation following another on an endless summer afternoon. (May)