Only a few volumes dedicated to the works of individual artists currently exist in the prestigious Breadloaf Contemporary Series. The newest [A Rosellen Brown Reader]—Rosellen Brown's selection of 12 short stories, several essays including “The Jewish Writer as Endangered Species” and “On Not Writing a Novel,” a lively interview with Tom LeClair, and a judicious selection of her poetry—sets another jewel in the diadem. The collection confirms Brown's literary commitment “to speak more perfectly than I really can, to a listener more perfect than any I know.”

These celebrated stories and poems, placed alongside some provocative essays, underscore her long-term complicity with that dream reader and perfect listener. The selected writing also suggests not only Brown's ability within various genres but also her enviable position in contemporary letters. In central themes, as in the sheer range of her talents, she may well be compared with the incomparable North American writer, Margaret Atwood, although Brown herself cites a kinship with Alice Munro. Like both these writers, Brown seems to be an honest and intrepid explorer of the strange landscape of our interior world.

Adult characters, often projecting a forbidding sense of emotional and intellectual isolation, seem trapped in “the amber of … choice.” Catastrophe crashes in from every side, and help is hard to give and harder to take. These postmodern characters sometimes seem powerless to do much more than react to a world not only formed but difficult to reform.

Yet Brown's work has always identified with complex ideas of reformation, of rebuilding after a house has crumbled or a life has shattered. A child of the 1960s, she comprehends that modern heroism is anything but self-assured. Do-gooders are themselves not quite at home in contemporary life and second-guess themselves while doggedly serving a whole world of disenfranchised, displaced survivors. In Brown's “The International Language,” new Vietnamese immigrants have escaped one world's overt dangers only to arrive at a new shore where they must confront “weapons and hunger … too subtle to be seen at first glance.”

Yet no imposed condition, no external distinction of class or tribe or gender used to separate human beings, weakens Brown's mantra of assertion that we are one and all joined heart to mind. Even Nature sometimes finds a way to soothe our loneliness and bridge our separation: In “A Wry Music,” a simple bee has redemptive powers and “may forgive the worst in us / may stop to drink honey / from a murderer's ear.”

Perhaps her poem “The Famous Writers School Opens Its Arms in the Next Best Thing to Welcome” establishes the controlling metaphor for this collection, where each individual character seems to be the place “where all the accidents happen.” Brown has the creative deference to follow her characters as well as lead them, admitting to “discovering as I go just what it is that I am traveling toward.” Her arrival at some established destination remains in question, but the writing Brown assembles here encourages more and more readers to journey along with her.