There's also a mystery here. Sturgeon's stories -- even when astutely selected, as in this volume; even when they're heartbreakingly fine, as most of these tales are -- give off a sense that something terrible must have happened long ago, almost certainly to Sturgeon himself. Which is not to say that Sturgeon was a writer who could not control his talent, or that the work in "Selected Stories" is anything like incompetent. Neither is the case, though some of the tales assembled here seem to run away from their author, and Sturgeon himself was certainly capable of spouting the awfullest flapdoodle, like some inebriated Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three in the airport lounge, and saith, "All you need is love, all you need is love, get me?, all you need is love," 'til the cows come home.

But most of the "Selected Stories" do not read like that. They are far more dreadful, and more fine, than that. They are like the residues of some terrible accident, one of those mass pileups on the interstate only visible from the CNN helicopter, anguished Edvard Munch faces turned up to the television cameras trying to convey something.

The intensity is shattering, so shattering that some of the tales burn right through the usual conventions of storytelling, and their protagonists -- some of them so bound in passion that they are nearly mute -- also tend to fall through the fabric of normal life, like the inarticulate hero of "Bianca's Hands," whose ultimately demented adoration of the slim beautiful hands of an idiot girl named Bianca leads him to marry her. The end is grotesque, grand guignol, profoundly pathological. We are left with ashes, a sense that someone (the author? the lover?) has been screaming into our skulls.

"Bianca's Hands" is a tale of horror, a form given over to the imparting of "unnamable" emotional states that give you the vicarious shakes, but most of these stories are science fiction, a genre whose protagonists, during the period Sturgeon wrote most of his work, tended to be gripped not by passion but by some sort of world-changing project. Sturgeon was first and foremost a genre writer. The 13 titles assembled in "Selected Stories," which constitute a mere 12 percent or so of his output of short fiction, were mostly written between 1944 and 1955, and almost all were published in magazines like Astounding, Galaxy or the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Only "It" (1940), an atypical horror tale featuring bad slime gussied up as Swamp Thing, and "Slow Sculpture" (1970) are from outside that central period. One story alone went straight into book form: "Bright Segment," an overdrawn tale of psychopathology with no genre content, was published for the first time in "Caviar" (1955), a Sturgeon collection.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"