White Tiger on Snow Mountain

These 13 tales from Gordon (Mystery Girl) run the gamut from erotic to romantic, from absurdist to psychedelic to unsettlingly realistic. His narrators mainly are writers themselves, albeit of the down-on-their-luck, derelict kind: the cast includes a newly minted middle-aged M.F.A. who lives with his parents; a hotshot bestseller who went from punk-rock stardom to AA and finds himself chaperoning a bleaker version of his younger self; and a blocked novelist who reports daily to a cafe to scratch out a single sentence, if he’s lucky. Gordon’s prose hits a rip-roaring, imaginative stride when he goes meta. In “What I’ve Been Trying to Do All This Time,” a character named David Gordon discovers that two very different women obsess over fictionalized notions of him, something that gives his aimlessness meaning—he’s been validated as a “significant ‘unimportant’ figure.” The same quick-witted, sardonic, subtext-heavy tone pervades “Su Li-Zhen,” as well as the title story and the pointedly titled “Literature I Gave You Everything and Now What Am I?” Gordon’s collection is filled with wild and funny stories. (Oct.)