Why has the short story fallen so far out of favor in recent times? Once upon a time, magazines were made or broken based on the quality of their short stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald sold his wildly popular stories in magazines to finance his novels. Most of the best-known authors of our time have written short stories, and yet these are considered ancillary, "practice," less worthy than the long sustained novel. Social and cultural critics lament the short attention span of Americans, blaming everything from video games and television to Internet chat rooms, where less is always more. In an environment with such a low threshold for focus over a long period of time, why are short stories not the prevalent material of the day?

Susan Perabo provides a fine, engrossing example of the strength of the supposedly "worn out" short story form in her collection "Who I Was Supposed to Be." There are no postmodern hijinks here to throw off people who just want a story with their story; Perabo delivers clean, engaging stories that move from start to finish without demanding thought. This is meant as a compliment; where some stories attempt to force you to put the pieces together, Perabo is telling a story, and we aren't supposed to be thinking about the woman behind the curtain working the strings.

Most of the stories begin with a string of sentences that come out of the gate at top speed and once read, the reader is hooked, no way out but forward. One story, "Counting the Ways," gives an account of a relationship unraveling in front of the backdrop of Princess Diana's death, and one of her dresses - purchased with an inheritance by a couple who can barely make the rent - serves to both hold them together and tear them apart, at the same time. Perabo works contradictions like that into her stories in ways that, if you were recounting the story to a friend, it would sound hackneyed and contrived. She takes writer's workshop ideas and turns out stories that feel completely original - as though these are the stories from which the workshop ideas originated, the original wellspring.

This is where Perabo excels: characters estranged from their lives, adrift and confused, who find connection or relief coming from unexpected directions. The lead story concerns a father who has taken up burglary in his retirement, upping the stakes to compensate for the boredom of retirement after a lifetime of the boredom of grocery store management. Another story relates a mother explaining the death of her infant to the family dog, which again sounds horribly contrived and Lifetime-network-worthy but instead brings meaning back to the idea of a story simply being touching and moving:

"I sat on the couch with Stu and waited. Stu put his head on my thigh and looked up at me. I wanted to do something for him, take him out to dinner with us to get his mind off the mystery of the missing baby. We sat there for s few minutes. I couldn't hear any noises coming from the bedroom, so I got up and went down the hallway. I looked in the door and saw Todd sitting on the edge of the bed. He was banging the side of his head again, but this time he was crying while he was doing it. Actually he wasn't really crying. He was more making little howling noises with his throat. And he just kept whacking himself on the head.

I went back into the living room. I had a desire to get Stu off the couch and give him a push toward the bedroom, so he could stumble upon Todd and see what the death thing was all about, but I didn't have the heart."

The way Perabo conveys the real numbness that one can only guess would come from losing an infant - the way she can fully imagine it and pare the experience right down to that numbness - is striking in its simplicity and directness and lack of melodrama. It is a story about when a person's outlets for grief have so much work to do, so much traffic, that they clog up and she wanders in a daze, neither grief stricken nor enraged nor really anything. It is not easy for a parent to imagine themselves in those shoes. Perabo puts the reader right there - first person, no looking away - captures that and the sound the reader hears at the end is the sound of that clog breaking loose, and you can hear that flood of grief coming. It is frightening and wonderful. With this story, and all of these stories, Perabo has produced a collection that can safely be pushed on any avid reader - and more importantly, on those we wish would read more.