Christine Schutt, finalist for last year’s controversial National Book Award, is closely associated with one of American fiction’s finest and most focused journals, Noon. Edited by Diane Williams, Noon may be said to represent contemporary microfiction: Its stories are shorter than those in magazines and tend to offer a picture, or set of pictures, rather than a narrative arc. Lydia Davis’s are often the shortest and best; likewise, her language is the simplest.

Ms. Davis continues Gertrude Stein’s experiments with repetitive syntax, only she seems stricter than Stein, and her brilliance less lucky. Ms. Schutt and Gary Lutz, another writer coming only recently to wide popularity, are more poetic: that is, their language is more colorful. Mr. Lutz, in particular, forces words to do unnatural work, and his seeming bluntness is really coy periphrasis: “I used to visit a younger man in the big, voluminal city, the one that maddened itself out between twin rivers,” he writes in one Noon story. Elsewhere, his language is more convincing, but it’s always on stilts.

Ms. Schutt’s language, in her new collection “A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer” (Northwestern University Press, 165 pages, $22.95), is also conscientiously unnatural, or overworked, but she folds her knotted moments into an everyday articulateness:

How bad it was Jean told her sister. Jean called the place the facility, eschewing its bucolic name and using Jack’s slang when she was angry. Then she called the facility a dry-out place, a place for rehab on the cheap. A motel it had been or a conference center, the facility had past lives in the same way as did its staff. First name only, confessing only their abuse, the pallid staff wore cushioned shoes and shuffled small steps. Their talk, too, was small and coughed out with erasures from whatever they saw looking back – not that, not that – but ahead, the home contract, the dickered pact, the rules to school the house against the wily abuser. “Addiction,” the staff said, “we’ve been there – and been there. Relapse is common with friends still using.” The staff twitched matches, frantically serene.

Besides the Yoda-like grammar of “A motel it had been” and the lyric summary in “wore cushioned shoes and shuffled small steps,” most of the unfamiliar language is effective. Talk “coughed out with erasures” strikes a familiar note, and the bunched-up syllables complete the picture of an unnervingly reticent hospital staff. Even the inverted word order of the first sentence shows how Jean shyly backs into this part of her life, her son’s crisis.

Ms. Schutt’s principal subject is slow emergency, the unraveling of lives caused by knowing mistakes. For Ms. Schutt’s characters, negligence is affirmed as a kind of aesthetic insight. “Never had he seen the girl off but he thought she would fail,” notices one grandfather, who is happily receding into the sunset while his daughter and granddaughter are in fact failing. In another story, a woman refers to “that poetry by which I live” – meaning not a grace, but an abusive man she has knowingly taken on as a boyfriend.

The stories in this collection seem to ponder crisis from a few months after the fact, when regret has wilted but problematic habits of mind remain. On balance, Ms. Schutt’s poetic language seems appropriate for this purpose. She chooses feelings that require standout phrasings: “The urgent first abrasive pleasure is a pleasure she would like to repeat even as it happens, so that she does.” You have to read that twice, but it makes sense: nostalgia for the present sweetens it.

Ms. Schutt’s debt to Stein’s sentences, in which meaning accumulates with each coil of phrase, is apparent in sentences like this one, but Ms. Schutt provides everyday adult drama her forebear often can’t. New Yorkers this summer will know, for example, the distinction she makes when she first writes, “This is a city, but we are in the park,” then adds: “We are straining to be in the park.”

***

Isaac Bashevis Singer, writes Hanna Krall, “was afraid of the Holocaust. Even his unclean spirits, demons, dybbuks, vampires, and devils were afraid. They never ventured into a carpeted hell with a green velvet chair in a place of honor.” The green velvet chair, in Ms. Krall’s story, is the throne of disabled Grandma Mina, who, hiding underground with other Jews, witnesses the strangulation of her husband, whose coughs, the others felt, would betray them. Grandpa’s spirit somehow leaps – like a dybbuk – into Mina, and with her newfound strength she goes to the police and betrays her compatriots. Ms. Krall, in her debut American collection, “The Woman from Hamburg” (Other Press, 260 pages, $19) is determined to explore the dark side of survivor stories.

Ms. Krall is a Polish Jew, born in 1937, a journalist who turned to literary writing. Her stories combine the promiscuous warmth of folktales – where entire communities are on intimate terms – with objective reportage. She interviews several characters who seem to be real people, and she often interpolates lists of the dead into her stories, a few of which are as strangely immersing as Singer’s.

One of the most affecting, “Phantom Pain,” begins as a tale of Nazi resistance, a dream of aristocratic righteousness: “So, Adolf Hitler has taken away our honor, too,” says the German commandant, when he learns of the “Aktion” against the local Jews. But Ms. Krall’s art is in the epilogue, in which this righteousness spoils, turning to arrogant madness. Her ailing hero, reinvested with his castle after the Iron Curtain falls, is comforted to think that “this whole joke will soon be over.” The list of local Jews who died 50 years earlier, which Ms. Krall then gives, belies the old man’s certainty.

There is the sense, in this little volume, that people carry wholly personal motives, independent of world-historical circumstance. This seems to be Ms. Krall’s method to show how the inchoate human animal has been suppressed in Holocaust narratives. She refers dubiously to “the Great Scriptwriter.” A survivor, remembering how a mother betrayed her son, has learned “that no one knows himself thoroughly.” In the last stories, Ms. Krall discusses Eastern European Jewry today and, provocatively, on AIDS memorials and Judaism. Her interventionist intellect indicates a figure larger than these stories. It is strange to have only this small selection in English.

***

Dai Sijie’s first book, the widely appreciated “Balzac and the Little Chinese Mistress,” was flawed by obeisance to Western culture: Two sophisticated city boys, exiled to a rocky mountain village by the Cultural Revolution, discover a cache of Western novels that inspire them to sexual pursuits and redeem their liberal souls. Mr. Dai’s densely picturesque new book, “Mr. Muo’s Traveling Couch” (Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages, $22), neatly reverses those themes: Here, a young Chinese man who has spent his youth in France, a devout Lacanian and a virgin, returns to China, expecting to find some use for his psychoanalytic training; he discovers his expectation is absurd. Mr. Dai’s new book is humorous where “Balzac” was solemn, but like “Balzac” it makes so many literary allusions that its own literary vividness looks slavish.