One of my favorite story collections is The Wonders of the Invisible World, by my former teacher, David Gates. The ten stories in David’s book are riveting and dark. Their incisiveness—not for nothing from the Latin, to carve—is downright scary; they are brutal and wise. The protagonists of these stories are old and young, gay and straight, women and men; and yet, they all tend to share certain qualities: a level of sophistication (high), education (ditto), attitude (bad), and class (white-collar middle, striving for upper). The result is a very strange and exciting paradox: a group of discontinuous cross-cuts that somehow adds up to a panorama.

Of the ten stories in Wonders, the one I return to most frequently is the first one, “The Bad Thing,” which I’ve re-read (and also taught) enough times now that I’d like to try and quote the opening from memory: “He has never hit me, and only once or twice in our two years has he raised his voice in anger. Even in bed Steven is gentle. To a fault. Why, then, am I wary of him?” But I don’t want to talk about “The Bad Thing.” I want to tell you about a story called “The Crazy Thought,” a sly devastator, and my nomination for the book’s outstanding deep cut.

The things that make “The Crazy Thought” such a marvel are not elusive, exactly, but they are relatively easy to miss. I confess that the story didn’t make much of an impression on me the first few times around. In fact, I had forgotten about it entirely until I pulled Wonders off the shelf to double-check my quoting-from-memory of the opening of “The Bad Thing,” which is the story I thought I was going to be writing about when I started. (Oh, and if you were wondering, my attempt at recitation was close, but not quite cigar-worthy. The quote given above is the amended, which is to say the correct version.)

Flipping idly around, I stumbled onto “The Crazy Thought,” and for whatever reason decided to stop what I was doing and give it a re-read. (Perhaps I was drawn in by the slightly bizarre, though arguably easier-to-memorize opening line: “The year was round, a millstone turning slowly clockwise, and even on this Friday afternoon in August, Faye could feel it moving down toward Christmas.”) In any case, true to its title, I now can’t get “The Crazy Thought” out of my head.

“At first, she did not think of stones.” So begins A.S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman,” the story of a middle-aged daughter whose grief over her mother’s death transforms her into a being of myriad crystals, taking her from animal to mineral. From my very earliest reading, “A Stone Woman” entered my consciousness like news I had been waiting to hear. It became mine, a touchstone of sorts, in the way certain stories do for us all, which initially puzzled me because I haven’t ever been particularly attracted to magical stories. In fact, it’s fair to say that pretty much as soon as trees start talking or shoes begin walking on their own, I’m apt to tune out, more pushed away than swept away. Yet this story of transformation, with its evocation of Icelandic mythology and utter disregard for the prosaic rules of reality, seemed to have something, something essential, to tell me about my own work.

Trying to describe why you’re in love with a story is like trying to describe why you’re in love with anything, or anyone. In the end—says the woman who just claimed she doesn’t much like magic—there’s a magic that can’t and arguably shouldn’t be dissected. But maybe at the heart of all romances is the sensation of being able to be oneself, the vision of being loved as the person you think you are.

When I need a swift dose of beauty and wisdom, I read the stories of Richard Bausch. Bausch’s lyrical prose and fierce intelligence, his abundant compassion and generosity, never fail to restore me. To my mind, Bausch is truly our modern Chekhov. Like that grand Russian godfather of the short story, Bausch’s work offers luminous insight into our meager race.

“Tandolfo the Great” is classic Bausch. Here we have his graceful language, both spare and lovely at the same time. Here we have Bausch’s fantastic characterization, where we not only witness his people from the outside, the limited external view, but we experiencetheir rich inner world, gain privy to the private workings of their hearts and minds. This compelling psychological component is Bausch’s forte. If fiction is indeed about human yearning, as many of us propose, then look no further for a master’s exquisite rendering of our complicated needs and desires. As the story’s scenes unfold, we continually access Tandolfo’s emotions and feelings—always nuanced to the dramatic moment—and we know deeply his thoughts as he responds to the world.

In “Tandolfo the Great,” our hero is a twenty-six-year-old loner named Rodney Wilbury. As a side job, Rodney moonlights as a clown (”the Great Tandolfo”) who performs magic acts at social gatherings. Our story opens with Tandolfo, already slightly tipsy in the afternoon, as he finishes his clown makeup before his bathroom mirror:

“She loves you not, oh, she doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t.”