‘Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.” These words of advice, given to Nam Le’s fictional alternate ego, resonate through his debut story collection like an ironical call to arms. Of the seven stories that make up “The Boat” (Knopf, 272 pages, $22.95), only three are plausibly autobiographical. The rest flout the traditional maxim “Write what you know,” taking on characters as diverse as Colombian drug lords, Iranian feminists, and a New York painter who sounds a lot like Lucian Freud. All sincere works of the imagination, these stories yet bear a self-conscious riposte to conventional wisdom. If ethnic writers are doomed to exploit their own heritage, the Vietnamese-Australian author seems to say, then let them exploit other, totally alien heritages as well.

The story that sets up Mr. Le’s argument is “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice.” Its long-winded title alludes to William Faulkner’s legendary Nobel speech, of 1950, in which the pioneer of American fiction called for a return to universal values in literature. Faulkner himself has become, at least in America, a ghettoized author, confined to regionalist “Southern” studies, and Mr. Le’s message seems to be that while all good stories are local, they partake of the same essential themes, no matter their origin.

His story’s narrator, named Nam, is a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which Mr. Le himself attended after a brief career as a lawyer in Melbourne, Asutralia. Nam is suffering from writer’s block ahead of an important due date when his father makes an inconvenient visit. Goaded by his uneasy relationship with his father, Nam sits down at his typewriter and bitterly begins a piece titled “Ethnic Story.” His subject is nothing less than his father’s own experience in the My Lai massacre.

How the story resolves — with unwanted editorial help from Nam’s father — is less important than the frankness Mr. Le brings to his theme. The proprietary view of ethnic literature — the notion that only a writer of a certain color can write a certain story — is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are unwritten rules beyond ethnicity that govern any author’s subject matter. Should a son tell his father’s story? Men may be allowed to write in the voice of a woman, but it will always be commented upon. And those who have experienced great loss will usually be taken more seriously than those who have only imagined loss.

Perhaps these unwritten rules are eternal and perfectly natural — but they matter more in today’s climate, where fiction writers are ambitious to write about faraway places and especially about strife and suffering beyond their own experience. Perhaps it’s the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, perhaps it’s globalization — but a brief survey of this spring’s hot debut fiction showed that almost every author privileged world history over private life.

Mr. Le stands out from the crowd because of the breadth of his research and the confidence of his imagination. He may prize the universal, but he doesn’t skimp on concrete detail. In “Tehran Calling,” for example, he could have described the row between an American visitor and her Iranian friend with dialogue and a few descriptions, but instead he takes us walking on the streets, describes smells, effects of lighting, and the fine points of street wear.

A recent New York Times profile writer treated Mr. Le to a restaurant he had never visited before — but which serves as the setting for five pages of his story “Meeting Elise.” Presumably, he read about picholine on the Internet.

Mr. Le may not apologize for writing about real places that he has never visited, but he doesn’t entirely dissemble, either. In “Cartagena,” the grittiest of the stories here, he winks at the reader when his 14-year-old Colombian narrator notes that El Padre, the cornrowed drug lord, looks “like a gangster in an American music video.”

Elsewhere, the awkwardness of long-distance empathy becomes a theme. In “Tehran Calling,” Sarah Middleton, having politely “deferred” to her friend Parvit’s background for too long, finally challenges the Iranian’s ethnic self-importance. “I’m sorry,” she says, “that my problems … were never as impressive as yours.”

But we are less likely to question Mr. Le’s authority, apparent as it is, than we are to mistrust our own right to judge his stories. I found “Hiroshima,” the most experimental story here, also to be one of the most absorbing. A short stream-of-consciousness tale told by a child on the eve of the city’s 1945 destruction, it has an urgency that some of Mr. Le’s other stories lack. But was I simply lumping “Hiroshima” in with Mr. Le’s other Asian tales, which are also his most authentic? Or did the story’s historical setting put me on the more familiar ground of historical fiction? Questions like these make reading “The Boat” a minefield.

There are many ticklish questions to ask about fiction and its sources, and they have been asked, recently, by many writers. Mr. Le’s distinction is to ask them without once seeming other than a hardworking practitioner of quality American lit.

blytal@nysun.com