to the lapidary prose of Franklin Fisher's Bones, a "portrait of the artist as a young missionary"; from the puckish laughter of Elouise Bell's Only When I Laugh to the mordant humor of Pauline Mortensen's Back Before the World Turned Nasty; from the deft word play and urban interiors of Neal Chandler's Benediction to the natural imagery and rugged outdoors of Douglas Thayer's Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone and Other Stories. Language is often pleasurable for its own sake: Chandler's stories about Mormons of the diaspora who are very much in the world and increasingly of it, and show the strain, give us urban middle-class Mormons hardly to be distinguished from middle America until their speech betrays them, their congregational language rich in collective memory and allusion. Thus weget "doctrinal punch" at Mormon socials, a smug Sunday School teacher sounding "like Dan Rather in the last days," a student "pure and unspotted from math," and a pyramid scheme with a strong resemblance to Amway as "God's own plan . . . the only divinely authorized plan for financial success in this life or the next" (Benediction passim).

Structure can be as sophisticated as style: Fillerup's story of a young teacher's determination to finish painting the rundown chapel on the Navajo reservation before he returns to less demanding academic life is perfectly paced. As he moves his shaky ladder from beam to beam and wearily mounts it to paint the almost unreachable ceiling, he recalls, stage by stage, his experiences, as precarious as his perch, serving The People