Charles D’Ambrosio’s second collection of fiction is superlative. Ten years in the making, “The Dead Fish Museum” (Alfred A. Knopf, 234 pages, $22) demonstrates that Mr. D’Ambrosio can write about anything he chooses. Indeed, his stories are so various that Mr. D’Ambrosio remains mysterious; his author-personality cannot be caricatured into a marketable outline that would haul him into the American spotlight, where he so richly deserves to be.

Mr. D’Ambrosio can write in a humble voice. He can write quiet stories. He can write busy stories. He can write about aggressive, troubled youth. He can quickly sketch a Chinese bodega, kill off the owner, and leave him, a bare resonance at the beginning of a long story. And he can create characters who care almost as much about God as Flannery O’Connor’s characters: “‘If your mind’s too great for you,’ Pete was saying, ‘you should just let God take it. That’s what Christ did. He was brain-dead. He never thought on his own.'”

At the same time, Mr. D’Ambrosio can invent a Manhattan screenwriter who keeps “cranking out those big-time Hollywood screenplays in order to bankroll a lifestyle that broke the sillymeter.” He is one of the few writers who can satirize hipster consumerism without sounding small: “In the little syncretic boutiquey spiritual figurines lined up on the windowsill and the crystal prisms strung from the ceiling on threads of monofilament I saw the very same occult trinkets that had decorated every bedroom I’d ever been in.” He can also write like a wise old poet, with a character reflecting, “Our life together took on a second intention,” after he learns and becomes preoccupied with the fact that his wife was raped as a teenager. Or, like a young poet, he can write about a woman’s eyes that “When you looked into them, you half-expected to see fish swimming around at the back of her head, shy ones.”

Yet Mr. D’Ambrosio’s work has a common theme. Most of his protagonists are quiet men and women who must contend with a less fortunate friend. The screenwriter’s girlfriend likes to burn herself; a typewriter repairman loves his crazy son; a Jesuitical boy’s schoolyard rival suffers the divorce of his parents. In every case, the protagonist retains his or her sanity but fails to truly help his or her friend.

Many of the stories collected here seem as rich as a novel; at the least, they are as rich as several different short stories, by different writers, harmoniously laid over each other. A Bonnie and Clyde-style story, “The Scheme of Things,” begins at a gas station that belongs to some lonely highway from decades past. But store-bought Halloween masks, trailer homes, and fluorescent candies soon enter the picture. Next, cinematic cornfields fill the page and a sympathetic couple from some tender Midwestern novel takes center stage.

A writer as sensitive as Mr. D’Ambrosio might want to blow apart these tropes, but he lets them sit quietly together. This comes across as deeply impressive and realistic. “The Dead Fish Museum” collects stories of beauty, insight, and rare eclecticism.

***

Etgar Keret, whose “The Nimrod Flipout” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 167 pages, $12) is finally available in an American edition, has been hailed as a radical new voice in Israeli literature. Mr. Keret has cousins at an international level – like Haruki Murakami, his young male characters favor hard-boiled speech and make no apologies for their juvenile habits, and they seem unfazed by the mild magical realism that pervades their lives. Yet Mr. Keret distinguishes himself with a kind of overarching sorrow. The deadly realities of Israeli life facilitate a style that differs from Mr. Murakami’s fatalism.

In the title story, Mr. Keret depicts three friends who have survived a fourth, Nimrod, the late bloomer who shot himself during their shared military service. The three survivors go mad in turn, repeatedly. They grow used to the routine, taking care of each other as Nimrod’s ghost makes his rounds. Like a traditional storyteller, Mr. Keret imagines three kinds of madness: One hears voices, one becomes a manic genius, and the other forgets his identity and panics. The reader understands that Mr. Keret does not linger over each detail. He’s more interested in the overall impression of the story.

Each of the stories seeks to capture a single intuition, and indeed all of them read as if they were written in a single sitting. Never believable and never engrossing, the stories invite the reader to read at a breakneck pace. If one story about the autopsy of a bombing victim feels too mechanical, the next, about a man who is not sure whether he is dead or about to open a laundromat, seems inspired: “So let’s say I’m dead now, or I open a self-service Laundromat, the first one in Israel.” In sentences like that one Mr. Keret’s glib imagination cuts through to the reader, making an incisive gesture, hard to interpret but easy to feel.

blytal@nysun.com