In “Snow White and Russian Red” (Grove/Black Cat, 291 pages, $13) her impressive debut novel, Dorota Maslowska’s prose sometimes recalls the grandiosity of “The Waste Land,” as when she writes “And through the night a city is built on us, a repugnant city, a great Dumpster, garbage collectors stand up and, leaning up against buckets, read old, disintegrating newspapers.”

But where other poets of apocalypse value the end of the world as an extremity cantilevered by the past, Ms. Maslowska insists on the present, grounding her sense of evil not in Milton, but in cartoons: “Behind the grating lives sweet and good evil, getting tangled up in his legs, painting mustaches on passersby. You can’t really steal it away from here, the little evil flees from us on a creaking bicycle … We have to avail ourselves of big evil, of the true evil of adults, drink alcohol, touch men, smoke cigarettes.”

The evil of Ms. Maslowska’s plot is indeed dissipation, although her slacker narrator, Nails, and his peers prefer to pretend that they are about to engage in a “Polish-Russki war under a white-and-red flag.” Nationalism is here an allegory for resentment of globalization. Nails and his friend Lefty, on speed, order a soda at McDonald’s, only to freak out when the cashier dawdles: “Come on, you Babylonian slut,” they shout, among many obscenities involving Brussels, “Osama,” and “Euro-American truck stop whores on Polish soil.”

Nails’s sense of eternity has been ruined by the non-biodegradable detritus of America: “And the umbrellas affixed with Coca-Cola logos are like leafy white-and-red plants calling to heaven for revenge, turned inside out. And plastic cutlery, plastic dishes fluttering through the municipal amphitheater in the same direction as the smoke, like on their own wind.” He self-consciously appropriates big words – such as “affixed,” “cutlery,” and “municipal” – which allude to the advertising jargon of the Western overclass.

Benjamin Paloff’s translation sounds like a Polish speaker awkwardly achieving brilliant English, which seems right, because even in Polish Ms. Maslowska’s voice must be trying to join the English language in battle. And English – that is, foreign idioms and icons – ultimately seduces Nails and redeems him, making him a benevolent comedian as well as a brute.

The slacker is morally abdicant, content to mock the world on its own terms. Nails is not. “And if Disease Control cut in here,” he says in an imagined protest letter to God, “they’re going to shut down your whole business, Lord, I’ve soiled my cuffs, my wife lost the cuff link, I demand a refund, and I’ll see you in court.” How frustrated he is, that instead of evil, he has himself battling Ronald McDonald.

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Amy Hempel is a renowned American miniaturist. Her short stories are more like miniature novels than like classical short stories. Instead of striking a single, sharp effect, they shuttle between parallel narratives, as a novel would. And their elliptical nature leaves plenty of room for novel-sized resonances. In one story, past pregnancies are remembered as a favorite movie, “The Uninvited,” is reviewed. In several stories the memory of a lost dog alternates with the memory of a lost husband.

Ms. Hempel is not shy about using coincidences like these; her narrators themselves are emotional sentinels, who compulsively connect the dots. Usually women recently abandoned, interested in dogs and the tricky logistics of cars and gardens, these narrators speak in an articulate voice, clipped so as to be sometimes foreboding. “I told her the village bylaws disallow moving before seven-thirty, and that I had waited until nine.”

Sharp prose comes naturally in extremely short short stories – although it should be noted that most in “The Dog of the Marriage” (Scribner, 141 pages, $20) are longish by Ms. Hempel’s standard. But for Ms.Hempel sharpness is an ethic as much as an aesthetic. At the climax of the story “Offertory,” the narrator, who has been entertaining her lover with stories of a prior, bisexual dalliance, finally agrees to tell him what made her female lover so dear to her.

“I told him in just one word. I said, ‘The answer to your question is: Precision.'” The precision of one word is a lancet, the wind in the Scheherazade like relationship escapes, and the narrator is left with the “thrilling calm” of having decisively told the truth.

It is often easy to imagine Ms. Hempel’s narrators trembling as they speak, selecting just the words that she can bear speaking. Her precisionist ethic is a response to trauma; it is defensive, a method of preserving dignity without lurching for gross self-empowerment. Sensitivity – not madness – scrambles the order in which some of the stories here are told. Ms. Hempel takes care to present a sensitive memory properly. A rape, in one story, or more often a cutting sentence, emerges according to a pacing borrowed, happily, from mystery novels.

Tellingly, Ms. Hempel incorporates a fair sprinkling of aphorisms into her carefully realistic prose: Themselves shopworn, these nuggets illuminate a mental landscape of worry and planning. “Important decisions have to be made quickly”; “I am trying not to take things personally”; “Take up space!” The irony in this last, so succinctly expansive, is proof of Ms. Hempel’s miniaturist vision, that less is more.

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“Flavor chiefly depends on how hungry you happen to be,” says the pedantic, self-centered narrator of Petros Abatzoglou’s “What Does Mrs. Freeman Want?” (Dalkey Archive Press, 111 pages, $12.50), a classic of postwar Greek literature now being published in the United States for the first time. Mr. Abatzoglou’s narrator, himself named Petros, is sitting on the beach, telling a female companion the life story of Mrs. Freeman, a somewhat ideal woman from an older generation.

Petros constantly interrupts himself to ask for another drink, or another dip in the sea. He has mastered the art of vacation: he constantly generates new little desires that he can then satisfy. Hunger is flavor. Mrs. Freeman, by contrast, fascinates him because she doesn’t seem to “want” anything. “Mrs. Freeman, by the way, never dreams. She plans her life carefully, but she never dreams.” Neither does she cry, or enjoy mysteries. She doesn’t merely avoid unpleasantness, she “refuses to acknowledge its existence.”

The fascinating subtext of Petros’s story is that after his introduction, the actual story of Mrs. Freeman shows that she is, in fact, full of wants: sexual, culinary, professional. At the age of 90, she declares to want “everything.” Mrs. Freeman, whose story is so detailed yet so vague, comes to seem like a narcisstic invention of Petros’s, a perfect foil he has dreamed up.As he restlessly follows the shade on the beach, adjusting his seat and drinking too much ouzo, his interest in a woman who “had the grave bearing of a person who has nothing to lose or gain anymore” comes to sound like a death wish.