Short story anthologies interest two classes of reader — he who wants to read a general survey, and he who wants to go over the table of contents with a fine-toothed comb. To the well-read, and perhaps small-minded, these anthologies are like betting sheets; they indicate who’s in and who’s out .

In the many anthologies of the 1990s, star-editors assumed the curatorial role, and their personal authority made this game more interesting. In his best-of-the-century roundup, why did John Updike include, of all Fitzgerald’s stories, “Crazy Sunday”? And wasn’t it characteristic that he left out Paul Bowles? And didn’t the diversity of writers in Joyce Carol Oates’s excellent 1994 Oxford anthology look a tad perfect? And would it be fatal to the reputation of Richard Yates that he made neither book? There’s always something to notice in these tables of contents: Tobias Wolff deserves kudos for including Edward P. Jones in his Vintage anthology, way back in 1994.

Richard Ford’s 1992 “Granta Book of the American Short Story” was perhaps the most interesting anthology of the busy decade. Focused, as Mr. Wolff’s was, on contemporary work, Mr. Ford’s nevertheless cast a much wider net. Not didactic, it was meant to be representative by accident — Mr. Ford would choose his favorite stories, and they would just happen to cover the waterfront. And now, with “The New Granta Book of the American Short Story” (Granta, 756 pages, $29.95), Mr. Ford recapitulates the first survey with all new stories chosen 15 years later, giving readers the rare chance to triangulate a writer’s sense of his own era.

The first Granta anthology began in 1944, with Jane and Paul Bowles, whose almost nihilistic stories of South America and Africa set an odd tone — vicious, cosmopolitan, sometimes primitive — that echoes the disruptions not so much of World War II as of modernism. Mr. Ford then slyly gave us Robert Penn Warren, whose poeticisms whet our appetites for stories that critique American innocence. Among these, Flannery O’Connor, a southerner like Warren, is the clear master. Her “Good Country People” (1955) gets better every time it is anthologized; it is like a sharp splinter that works itself deeper and deeper into the skin. Eudora Welty, a more poignant writer, is a close second. It is fitting that Mr. Ford, himself from Mississippi, makes these two Southern women shine; an Updike anthology might have included different stories from the same authors, to a very different effect. The focus of the 1992 anthology is not, however, a regional one. From the north, he gives us John Cheever’s early “O City of Broken Dreams” (1948), which seems almost schematic in its portrayal of midwestern life, as now does James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). But Baldwin’s expository talents, engaged as ever with the high-pressure depths of race in America, make this story tower above those surrounding it. Mr. Ford seems to let his anthology go flat in the early ’60s, the better to show off the refreshing power of the next generation: Stanley Elkin, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover.

The most illuminating moment in Mr. Ford’s 1992 anthology comes when, following close on the heels of that experimental generation, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, and Barry Hannah appear. The cunning immaturity of Stanley Elkin’s “A Poetics for Bullies” (1965) and the all-out flotsam of Barthelme’s “The Indian Uprising” (1968) leave us well-prepared for the saxophone and fighter-jet high jinks of Barry Hannah’s “Testimony of Pilot” (1978).

The beauty of Mr. Ford’s 1992 anthology is the way it allows us to notice gradual progressions. The new anthology, by contrast, slants heavily toward the last 15 years. As far as older stories go, the Southern influence is heightened, though Grace Paley and John Updike reappear, representing the North with idiosyncratic verve. The experiments of the ’60s seem less important to Mr. Ford than they did in 1992; only Barthelme remains. In some cases, the more contemporary emphasis means a stark tradeoff: Bernard Malamud is gone; Nathan Englander has arrived.

But one of the most convincing distillations of recent American fiction can be found in the second half of the anthology. “Work,” a story from Denis Johnson’s 1992 collection, “Jesus’ Son,” neatly connects the bighearted rawness of writers like Carver and Andre Dubus with the grunge pyrotechnics of George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill. In Mr. Johnson’s stories, the self-destructive men of the earlier generation have become near-teenagers, bright with pride. In his introduction to this volume, Mr. Ford stresses the idea of audacity — and the kinkiness of Ms. Gaitskill, the friable simulacra of Mr. Saunders, even the premature melodramas of Julie Orringer bear him out. In his 1992 anthology, he wrote that the urgency of a short story depended on a sense that “someplace out there” there is misrule, and these newer stories illustrate clearly what he meant by that. Even his “discoveries” — lesser-known writers like Kevin Canty and Dennis McFarland — finger the seams of queasiness (class, sexuality) that paradoxically hold America together.

Delinquency courses through these stories. Junot Diaz, Matthew Klam, and ZZ Packer capture the farouche complexity of young American misfits with a sophistication that would have impressed Baldwin. Mr. Ford has lavished care on these anthologies — they are embroidered with Easter eggs, coincidences of detail. They are the work of an honest liberal, more personal yet also more inclusive than the average canon. Anthologies can be written off as misleading, commercial grab bags, but Mr. Ford’s represent a high critical art.

blytal@nysun.com