Divided into thematic segments such as Portraits, Relationships, Family and Existential Moments, more than a hundred writers are represented in this stubby new collection from China.

Many of these stories, like Ling Rongzhi's "Odd Day, Even Day," depend on carefully contrived coincidences, misunderstandings and synchronicities for their effect. The largely apolitical topics may reflect the limits of dissent in China, but not of the desire to complain, to grouse about prevailing conditions, which in many cases remain appalling.

In "Time Travel" by Cain Nan, it is the feeble resolve of the individual rather than the state that fails. The social contract, written, rubber-stamped and delivered by a higher authority, is never questioned. A strong strain of anti-materialism runs through many of the stories, which are quests for enduring values. "Reckoning" by Zheng Hongjie, provides an object lesson in honesty over venality. "Only when the accounts are clear and accurate," the county schoolteacher in the story declares to his students, "can a person be clean." There is an oblique message, an appeal against corruption in rural areas here.