It is not easy to count your blessings. Writers often make a character turn inward, to make an autobiographical judgment, and the difficulty of making such a judgment can be the engine of an entire novel. Such accountings can be prideful, futile, or, in a favorite trick, grossly unreliable. Sometimes a character’s inability to take stock of his own life can even be mistaken for a modernist difficulty. It is a specific pleasure, then, to read Frederick Busch, whose characters share a poised self-consciousness of their own desires and values. In “Rescue Missions” (Norton, 304 pages, $24.95), his posthumous story collection, they especially share a need to be comforted.

“I’d like to be remembered as a really honest, minor writer of the 20th century,” Mr. Busch once said. He died on February 23 of this year, having published numerous novels and stories. Mr. Busch is beloved of writers, but the public has never become familiar with his name, perhaps because his settings and characters are so variegated. In this collection alone, he writes about Jewish immigrants, moved from the Lower East Side to Midwood; about young men fighting in Iraq, and about good, worldly men and women, saying goodbye to each other and even dying.

In many of these stories, death rescues sensations. In “Good To Go,” a son, emotionally deadened by war, evokes for his mother the visible memory of his boyhood self. In “One Last Time For Old Time’s Sake,” an adulterous couple tries to say goodbye, but is forced to return again and again to the precise feeling of necessity that brought them together in the first place. The woman also tells an anecdote: When she was 16, she was brought to an elderly woman’s deathbed. The elderly woman seems to fade; she begins to drift away. Her husband, standing by, says: “Dessie! Dessie! What do you need? What can I get you? What do you want?” The woman’s eyes flutter open. “Sex,” she says.

Death, sensuality, and comfort combine so well for Mr. Busch because he bases his stories on a particular kind of woman. In one story, “Patrols,” a man tells her that he likes the way she is “chipper and bitter and tough.” In another story, a woman addresses her departing lover in an instant of momentary linguistic relief: “Don’t be chipper, you chipper son of a bitch.”

These women like to know what they are talking about. In “A Small Salvation,” a kindergarten teacher has struck up a romance with one of her student’s grandfathers. The student is troubled by the loss of his totemic comfort cape, and she makes him a new one.The grandfather thanks her for the “gesture,” at which point she reminds him that “an action isn’t always a gesture,” practically saving the English language at one stroke.

It is the precision of language that allows Mr. Busch’s characters to so precisely value their blessings and desires. It comes out even when his characters use the romantic “oh” in dialog, an indulgence they and their author have earned and enjoy for our vicarious benefit.

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In worldliness and savored experience, Mr. Busch has a companion, another writer’s writer, James Salter, who this month with his wife, Kay Salter, publishes “Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days” (Knopf, 461 pages, $27.50).

Each day of the calendar gets its own mini-essay. For pleasure and for education, there are many advantages to this form of organization.

For example, the entry on bread made me want to get up and buy a baguette. I was free to do so, but had I been reading a cookbook I would have had to buy a great many other things, distracting me from the bread.

The September 13 entry, only three sentences long, gives the history of the “en-cas,” the light snack or meal waiting at home, in case of late-night hunger. This detail would have been lost in any other format, but I lingered over it all day: “King Louis XIV’s en-cas at Versailles was bread, two bottles of wine, and a carafe of water for the night.”

There are things here that you may not believe, but you will want to think about anyway. On June 7 you will be told that “sake is not usually drunk with sushi — rice wine and rice is usually disfavored.”

This claim is like the claims of Mr. Salter’s fiction: neat, luxurious, and probably true.

Most of the entries refer back to pleasure, and a few abandon food almost entirely, to describe love. Nonetheless, the most novelistic parts of the book are perhaps those that provide tips: on dinner parties, or on what tools — a vegetable peeler, a corkscrew, a good knife — to bring to a rented house, just in case.

If information-glut is the sin of contemporary fiction, then it is strange to see how life-like, transporting, and even morally instructive this book of facts can be.