Jennifer Egan writes with a cool, glimmering confidence in "Emerald City," her first collection of short stories. These pieces include both early and recent work -- one story was written for a writer's workshop, others were published in The New Yorker and Ploughshares -- yet they share similarly disturbing themes. Many are set in remote countries, and they tell of inaccessible dreams and isolated characters who long to find understanding or absolution.

The opening story, "Why China?," follows a flush bond trader -- he's under investigation for fraud -- as he drags his wife and "blond, expensive-looking children" through the crowded and dirty country in a restless and confused search for his lost self. In "Letter to Josephine," a timid, magazine-nourished woman married to a rich man can only begin to observe her surroundings -- the sea in Bora Bora, the Santa Barbara sun -- when she imagines describing them in a letter to a friend she left behind among the Howard Johnsons and ramshackle houses. Other stories take us through the lives of models, housewives, fashion stylists and suburban teens.

Although Egan writes of her distant locales from first-hand experience, she is most at home in America's sunny backyards, where barbecuing families are busy keeping matricidal sons (Was it an accident, as the narrator claims, or was it an experiment?) away from the flames, where pure Catholic schoolgirls are wrapped in fur coats after slicing open their arms, and booze-sodden adventurers whisk away other people's fiancees for a week's hazy fun. This is A.M. Homes and Scott Bradfield territory -- examining the wild stirrings beneath the pretty surfaces, the longing for other people, places and lives among characters who live on "the edge of something hidden," who nurse "a pleasant ache."

Because these stories were written at different points in her development, some lack the polish that defines the whole. Nevertheless, although many of the stories were completed before Egan's well-received novel, "The Invisible Circus," "Emerald City" presents a much sharper, more sophisticated writer, one with the quick, smooth ability to portray the desires of the repressed and superficial to touch that shimmering, fantastic realm that lies just out of reach.

-- Christine Muhlke