At 84, Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer is the Methuselah of contemporary literature: someone who offers the wisdom of the ages but who—as his 10th and latest story collection reveals—tends to repeat it too. Yet if most offerings in The Death of Methuselah only echo such powerful earlier collections and novels as Gimpel the Fool (1957) and The Manor (1979), half a dozen speak with an enviable authority. The son of a Hasidic rabbi, Singer was born in the Polish town of Radzymin in 1904 and emigrated to the United States 31 years later. His prodigious literary output, which includes essays, plays and children's books, has always demonstrated a proximity between the Old World and the New.

That characteristic is evident in the new book's 20 short pieces and their recurring themes, which range from jealous love to the mysterious relationship between the natural and supernatural realms. Foremost in Singer's writing, however, is the principle that, as one character puts it, “The emotions are the very essence of our being.” In Singer's world, reason and morality can offer little resistance against the force of erotic passion. In “Disguised,” Pinchosl, a shy student at a Polish religious school, runs away from his new wife. Years later, she finds him living as a transvestite with another man.

Betrayal extends to the supernatural world in “The Jew from Babylon.” In that story, an anguished miracle worker who has relied on the mystic arts of exorcism and clairvoyance is destroyed not only by a rabbi's rational skepticism but by what the miracle worker calls the “Evil Ones”—demons who “take revenge for all the times he had dominated them with his sorcery.” But the collection also demonstrates Singer's lighter touch: “The Hotel,” set in Miami Beach, Fla., and “Sabbath in Gehenna,” set in hell, both depict more comic aspects of the human condition. And in the title story, Singer rewrites biblical myth by mixing humor (“When you pass your nine hundredth birthday, you are not what you used to be”) with his version of the apocalypse.

In Singer's pantheistic universe—where everything is animated by the spirit of creation—damnation and salvation are everyday concerns, not abstract articles of faith. But while Singer's vision is largely pessimistic, he offers a slender thread of hope through art. As he audaciously suggests in his preface, art “can in its way attempt to mend the mistakes of the eternal builder in whose image man was created.” At his best, the author of The Death of Methuselah is still able to demonstrate why that statement is more than an idle boast.