This collection of 40 stories translated from 37 languages, from places ranging from Galway to the Urals, gives anglophone readers a very different take on the world of contemporary letters. It also generates a very different sense of how that world is constituted: virtually every nation provides a story, which means that the Europe here is quite substantially eastern. This is a fragmentary continent of linguistic particularists but one where borders are permeated by economic migration and post-war diasporas ("Dumbo's Death" gives us a Serbian junkie dying on a Barcelona street), where electronic surveillance is total and deadly ("Taboo" from Belarus), and where Russian witches still cast out the evil eye and starving Romanians fight over a goose. Many of the writers are young; the orientation is primarily modernist (Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" casts a slender, melancholy shadow over the poignant carnival oddity of "The Ugliest Woman in the World"). This project is so fecund and committed that one wonders how art can be taken so casually in this country.