In the words of one of the South's reigning queens of literature, Eudora Welty, good fiction should teach us "not how to conduct our behavior, but how to feel." So quotes this year's New Stories from the South guest editor Allan Gurganus in his introduction. According to Gurganus, fiction is meant for more than distraction, or escape. In fact, Gurganus means to say that fiction (and this reader would venture to say art in general) is obliged to inspire us to consider our lives in relation to the lives of others, real or imaginary. Good fiction should offer us more than simple consolation; it should instruct us in the manner of community, social responsibility. In Gurganus' words, good fiction should teach us to negotiate "the crucible of moral choice."

Moral Choice is a comfortable enough position when the actors and their conflicts are easy to identify, ones which fit into our acceptable tableau for right and wrong. What is important about fiction, however, is that it can complicate our sense of right, wrong, and normal. The stories in this book do just that, and so open the door to broader possibilities, not just for what we consider normal, but to whom or which situations we may be able to connect our own lives without shame or embarrassment, without judgment.

Gurganus concludes the explanation of his guiding principle for this collection with four personal albeit socially bound questions he believes these stories should and do try to address:

What can I do to save another person? For whom am I responsible? Are compassion and truth telling their own essential everyday crusades? Are any of my tries at decency barely enough?

It's not that these stories give us the answers, but that they encourage us to ask the questions, beginning a process of discovery. What we discover as readers may be similar to what the characters do; it may veer us in another direction entirely. What matters is that there is some questioning about the nature of reality as we once perceived it, or of our obligations to others as well as ourselves. You may not like all the characters in these stories; indeed, you may walk away with nothing but contempt for some of them. It's what happens in the process of making that decision that counts in this case. As unlikable as some of these characters and/or situations may be, none of them can be dismissed out of hand. None of them are open and shut cases.

Daniel Wallace's story, "Justice," gives us just such an example. The protagonist is a husband and father, one who looks to be suffering from a nasty case of obsessive compulsive disorder, dictating only one rule for his family; that "the last of everything was his." This is the first characteristic the reader discovers about him, and it starts like a joke. The story, although it may feel at first as if it is laughing out loud, moves fast and certain towards a grave moment. This guy is serious. When the reader finds out that one of this man's children has used the last of the Kleenex, what feels as if it should be farce reads instead as absurdly dangerous, not just for the son, but for the father as well. He is a man struggling with order, with his place in it. As Wallace gives it to us, this man is no fascist dictator, outrageous as his demands may be. He is looking out at a world whose beauty and grace seems to have slipped out of his grasp. It's Wallace's uncompromising look at this man that keeps him human. We are not asked to make excuses for him, neither to pity him. It's recognition this man is after, and Wallace gives it to him.

"The Burning" by Cary Holladay, offers us a glimpse at pre-American Revolution race relations. Though no joke, this story starts out as "Justice" does, fast and hard, with a slave being burned alive, executed for the murder of her owner. It's as much this woman's story - not told through her literal voice, but by trope, through fire, her torture and anguish presented in those surviving her - as it is the story of the owner's only son, a man plagued with his own incompetence, loneliness, isolation, and guilt. Easy as it is to punish this man for his inexcusable acts of violence against another human being, Holladay pushes the horror of being burned alive to engulf the woman in the flame as well as the lives left behind. It's not exactly empathy readers may feel for the white man or any of the other white characters in the story, but something like it, when his wife writes in a letter, "it hurts him even when he sleeps." As modern day readers, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that this family's troubles will only get worse as the years pass. On a personal level, much as we are appalled by racist behavior and attitudes, this man is plagued with the physical and psychic repercussions of pain he caused. Of course, it hurts him when he sleeps. As in Wallace's story, the point is not to excuse the characters of their transgressions, but to see the people whole Ð faults and all.

What holds these stories together, as Gurganus sets up from the beginning, is a deep sense of loss, whether it is of faith, love, freedom, or ultimately, life itself. These stories are filled not just with human characters, but animal ones, and even physical locations that ache, and not always with regret. They are full of this, but also of desire, goodness, and not-so-goodness; they're bored, frustrated, violent, reticent, but mostly, they're real, even in the most surreal instances. Too, these stories are marked by a powerful sense of what results from such loss - possibility - for the paragraphs beyond the end of the story, the future, that which is not written.

Readers must be willing to twist in time, as well as travel beyond the borders of possible physical boundaries, without worrying about getting lost. Keith Lee Morris' "Tired Heart" starts out simply enough as a story about relocation, a U-Haul truck, a man who loves his wife, and a quest both with and against Darkness. A la Harry Potter, the story contains a magic map and a mastermind in a trench coat. The deeper the story goes, however, the more it reveals itself as a story of dislocation, maybe physical, maybe mental, but certainly emotional. Morris asks his protagonist and reader both to suspend their disbelief, to investigate their own faith both in terms of what is and what is wished to be. By the end of one man's journey across either the country or the chasms in his own mind, the reader has been allowed to see beyond the limits of this man's convictions, to something precarious, risky, but brimming with hope.

"Best Of" collections, as concepts, set their goals on a slippery slope. What's "best" gets tossed into conversation casually, and too often without a clear sense of qualification. However, Gurganus makes his criteria utterly transparent; his sense of what makes a story or a writer Southern is grounded in more than stereotypical notions of Mitchell wannabes and Twain cast offs. Who tells the story about getting beaten better than the one who survived it? As if he, himself, is remembering the Confederate surrender in 1865, he writes "We made defeat our merit" and in the next line, quotes his own oldest living confederate widow; "stories only happen to those who can tell them." Gurganus is a writer with a healthy sense of humor about what can go so terribly wrong, even with the best writing. The combination of this with how deliberately, how concisely, he points out what, exactly, makes a piece of writing Southern qualifies him by his own criteria. He is bitterly aware of what's painful about the South and unwilling to cut himself free of it.

This year's collection of southern writing is an eclectic mix of story tellers, all of whom have proven their right to tell, not solely because they have emerged from a tradition of the downtrodden. No, these stories show their readers something else, the means to keep going, despite heartache, betrayal, physical limitation. In choosing the right stories for this edition, Gurganus claims he wanted "Energy and Heart É riskÉ themes so ancient they feel new again." For this book and maybe for his readers as well, he wanted "Wide - Open Sympathy and a Living Wit." Considering Welty's impetus for reading fiction, learning to feel, this seems like the best place to start.