by JULIET WATERS

Just before I meet up with David Bezmozgis, I bump into a friend who I estimate might have gone to McGill when Bezmozgis did, in the mid-'90s. His name doesn't ring a bell, so I show her his picture from the dust cover of Natasha: And Other Stories. Her response: "Hmm… who didn't look like that at McGill?" And true enough, if you took DNA from every male McGill student and cloned one, he probably would look something like this blond, Jewish guy with geekster-chic glasses.

But it's unlikely that our McClone would write like David Bezmozgis. His highly resonant and original stories assume the shape of Russian classics, but are drawn from his life growing up as a very young Latvian immigrant in Toronto. They range from poignant, like "Tapka," a story about a six-year-old boy who brings about the near death of a family pet, to gently sordid, like "Natasha," about a teenage suburban drug dealer who spends a summer in his parents' basement with a teenage Russian porn actress.

Bezmozgis has achieved the kind of immediate and overwhelming attention that few - actually it's probably safe to say zero - McGill grads have achieved for a book of shorts. Last year his stories were published in The New Yorker and Harper's. Meanwhile, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux were preparing to launch him as their hottest literary discovery of the season.

In the flesh Bezmozgis, 30, has more charisma than his picture would suggest. When I meet him, he's just come from Schwartz's and readily offers this as a possible lead. But I've already done hip Jewish writer eats at Schwartz's (David Rakoff, July 18, 2002), so he offers to talk instead about hookers on Ste-Catherine. He's doing a great job of impersonating the steely-eyed charm of a metrosexual Russian pimp, but he doesn't actually have much to say on this subject other than "they seem healthy."

So we talk instead about his book, and about the metamorphosis of superficially autobiographical material into universally accessible stories.

"Minyan," a story about trying to find 10 Jewish men to do a funeral service for an elderly homosexual Jew, brought to my mind Shmelvis, the Montreal documentary that also involved trying to find 10 men to do a funeral service in Graceland for Elvis. I want to know if this was some kind of trope that often appears in Jewish stories. Bezmozgis has heard of Shmelvis, which makes sense, given that he's the director of the documentary L.A. Mohel. He explains, however, that his story grew less out of a literary tradition than out of a combination of wanting to write about his grandfather's old-age home, and playing with the sociological hypothesis that one out of 10 people are gay. "This idea became a launching point… I'd never heard of old gay Jews… but if you play the numbers…"

The seed for "Tapka," fortunately, did not come out of any personal experience of accidentally leading dogs into traffic. "I do remember that there was a friend in the family who had a dog… nothing like what's described here. And also I got a dog for the first time in my life - my mother was afraid of dogs - and then I started spending time with the dog. And then I read some Chekov stories that were very simple in structure. So it was all these things combined."

"Tapka" is the first story in Natasha. It's actually the last story Bezmozgis wrote for the collection. Still, it works perfectly as the lead. Tapka, the dog, fractured by a combination of innocent neglect and circumstance, not quite dead, a little in shock, but evidently loved, is the template for many of the characters that appear in subsequent stories. She may even have something in common with many of the readers who will pick up this book, which may be one clue to its remarkable success.

Natasha: And Other Stories by David Bezmozgis,
Harper Flamingo, hc, 147pp, $24.95