by JULIET WATERS

The day before I started reading Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories & 12 Excellent Drawings, I happened to come across Sarabeth Purcell's essay, "Why Modern Fiction is So Much more Punk Rock Than Music Ever Will Be," at Powells.com. Purcell, a self-described music nerd, recalls reading American Psycho as a teenager and realizing, "how much more vital and edgy it [modern literature] is than music has been for the last thirty years… Fiction, modern fiction, today, is punk rock. Maybe even cooler than punk rock ever was, because it's not about fashion. It's about expression. True expression. Without fear, without censorship."

While I wince at straining to defend writing as cool, something kept bringing me back to the label punk while I was reading these stories. It wasn't that they're angry, or subversive or X-rated, although many of them are. It's something else. They're uncomfortable, and sometimes dissonant, but mostly they're strangely fun, which makes all these other qualities more bearable.

Lara Stapleton, who edited the anthology along with Veronica Gonzalez, tries to label these stories when she calls them "non-realist." It's true that many draw from science fiction or comics, introducing the bizarre, perverse or the fantastic, but it seems a dull label for such a non-dull collection.

These writers range from the well-known, like Jonathan Lethem, to the becoming-known, like Kelly Link, to the first-time published, like Andras Tapolcai. While the description "very good" might give the wrong impression that they aren't as "excellent" as the drawings, it also implies that they aren't trying to be excellent. And, as many artists will agree, often the best and truest stuff happens when you're not trying too hard.

The first story "Trespassing," by NYC-based writer Charlotte Warren, which tells the story of an undiscriminating womanizer named Aladdin and his naïve wife, Jesus, is not necessarily the best, but it is typical. As Aladdin plots to deflower a family of five 70–90-year-old spinster sisters, it's hard to put one's finger on what makes this story so weirdly sexy. Same could be said about "Greedy, Greedy," by Su Avasthi, which opens with the difficult-to-resist sentence, "The sex addict met the anorexic at a bookstore that kept its cookbook section next to the erotica." No one would describe what follows as a feel-good story, but the playfulness with which Avasthi pits her two desperate characters against each other makes it impossible to turn away.

Editors seem to have steered clear of the too-obviously quirky, using an uncharacteristically dark story by Pagan Kennedy. At the same time, there's something unexpectedly sweet in this tale of a young girl being forced to molest herself by a crank caller posing as a doctor. It's so creepy and yet so nostalgic, just like her memories of the onion gum, remote-control ghosts, fake blood and X-ray glasses advertised at the back of comic books, the same glasses worn by the "underwear man" who she imagines sneaking into her room at night to check if she's wearing panties.

While there are many great and perhaps not-as-great stories in this collection, Lethem's "The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted By a Knock on the Door" is the anthology's tour de force. The Dystopianist's rival, the Dire Utopianist, is known for a "pitiless art in which his utopias wrote reality itself into the most persuasive dystopia imaginable." The conflict between these two rivals is more than just a hilarious and pointed satire of literary envy. It perfectly captures the energy and playfulness that is driving some of the best new fiction out there.

Of course, the complimentary CD with songs inspired by many of the stories didn't hurt when I was thinking up my punk comparison. The music is way more trip hop than punk, but the fact that this fiction goes well with a soundtrack says a lot. n

JUNCTURE: 25 VERY GOOD STORIES AND 12 EXCELLENT DRAWINGS EDITED BY LARA STAPLETON AND VERONICA GONZALEZ, SOFT SKULL PRESS, PB, 288PP, $26.95