The Student Body

Fiction, like life, has its lessons, and it's a wild ride on the learning curve when storytelling goes to school. The short stories in this collection negotiate the heights, the depths, and the unexpected angles of campus intrigue, sexual and intellectual awakenings and reckonings, and all the heartache and hilarity of a sentimental education. The work of such well-known authors as Stephen King, Marly Swick, and Ron Carlson appears here as well as stories by most promising new voices. The results are sometimes harrowing (in King's story, a serial killer roams a campus), sometimes droll (in Lucia Perillo's "The Wife of an Indian," an academic adjusts his ethnicity to get tenure), and often poignant (as in Dan Chaon's story of the aftermath of an accident that injures a fraternity president.)