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When I was a kid, a discarded cigar box was a prize, waiting to be filled with all matter of treasures. Interesting rocks and smooth-polished chestnuts, photos, old pens, cat's eye marbles and toy cars and animals. If you thought you outgrew the need for such things, you may find that old desire renewed -- or at least comfortably echoed -- by this collection of small, and frequently intricate, stories.

Although Michael Swanwick's novels have earned plenty of acclaim, they have never been as celebrated as his short stories. Collections such as Tales of Old Earth, Gravity's Angels, and others offer the award-winners and the better-known stories. But Swanwick has also produced plenty of little-known short-short fiction. "The primary rule of writing is to use exactly as many words to say something as it takes, no more, no less," he tells us in his introduction. These stories offer his proof.

The title story is a cheeky five-minute version of the classic tale of the man who sold his soul to the Devil for all the world's knowledge. The author encourages readers to perform the work themselves. (Anecdotally, it first played atop a trash can outside the convention center during a long-ago Boskone). The staging couldn't be simpler: a cigar box as stage, and the roles played by readily available household implements: a cigar as Dr. Faustus; Helen of Troy, the mystical Light of Ontology, an Angel of the Lord, and the fires of Hell all played by a box of matches; and Mephistopheles himself appearing as a cigar cutter. Love, pride, betrayal, and death: you'll be hard-pressed to find a more memorable -- and pithy -- condensation anywhere else.

An abecedary is a curious sort of meta-story: a set of twenty-six short stories, one for each letter of the alphabet. Swanwick's "An Abecedary of the Imagination" contains entries such as "A is for Atlantis" (where the lost continent is found to be not so distant and a bit less magical than we might have hoped), the nightmarish "N is for Nixon", and the blackly comic "G is for Gondwanaland" with its memorable opening:

Because I was a science fiction writer and thus partook of the enormous prestige America affords both the arts and sciences, I was the first civilian allowed back in time to the Ordovician, wherein we consider the potential cosmic backlash of careless time travel.

Charlene's sixth grade teacher told her she would burn her eyes out before she was 30 if she kept reading and writing so much. Fortunately he was wrong. Her work has also appeared in Aboriginal SF, Amazing Stories, Dark Regions, MZB's Fantasy Magazine, and other genre magazines.