Ten Women Who Shook the World: Stories

""Behind each of these stories is a friend,"" proclaims Brownrigg's epigraph, and the tales in this debut collection, each of which showcases a female protagonist, share the goofy insightfulness and occasional impenetrability of an in-joke shared by a clique of bold, brassy girlfriends. Brownrigg, a California native and London-based expatriate, generated interest last year with The Metaphysical Touch, a philosophical novel documenting a relationship set in cyberspace. While that book leveraged its contemporary setting to make pronouncements about the state of the soul in a turn-of-the-millennium, Internet world, the entries here avoid markers of place and time, and unfold in a magical realist universe where trees and birds have personalities, and Egypt's pyramids go up in three days. At its best, the collection is a fun, feminist set of quirky fables, but Brownrigg's conceptual bent sometimes makes them seem more like thought experiments than reader-friendly fiction. ""Amazon,"" the opening narrative, chronicles the affectionate bond that develops between the narrator and her assistant, Martha, two enterprising '90s types who just happen to build the Taj Mahal, Golden Gate Bridge and Trans-Siberian Railway together. In ""The Bird Chick,"" a bag lady with theatrical ambitions coordinates a production of Hamlet, starring the flock of birds that resides in the local park. ""The Lady in the Desert,"" a monologue featuring a woman who banishes herself from civilization in order to lose 10 pounds, pokes fun at the ""starvation diet"" fad. While the collection benefits from Brownrigg's intriguing iconoclasm, the author's tendency to overintellectualize deprives her work of real substance; without sympathetic characters or emotionally compelling plots, these stories fail to live up to their title's earthshaking promise. (June)