by Peter LaSalle.

University of Georgia Press, 256 pages, $24.95

BY KRISTIN LATINA
Special to the Journal

Peter LaSalle may not be a literary household name, but if you read his latest collection of short stories, Tell Borges If You See Him, you might just wonder why not.

LaSalle, who grew up in Warwick, has taught at both American and French universities, published fiction in leading journals and anthologies, and won a handful of literary awards, including the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The story for which he won this honor is the centerpiece and provides the title for this collection.

LaSalle plays with time and perception, paying constant homage to famed Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. Like Borges’ short stories, LaSalle’s deal with questions of identity, philosophy, and the nature of what we call “reality.”

Some of them have a free-flowing style, which communicates perfectly the intense, confused, or distressed emotions of the characters. “Where We Last Saw Time,” for example, is about a man long out of college who finds himself back in a Harvard cafeteria, trying to dissuade his old girlfriend from choosing Cameroon as her Peace Corps assignment. The story is disorienting but engrossing because it speaks to a desire many of us harbor: to go back and change something that went wrong in our past.

“I tried to start all over again,” says LaSalle’s protagonist Jack. “I tried to get it all right. I went through the whole afternoon and evening again, thought I might be able shove through the glass doors of the decidedly seedy cafeteria and reenter into that world . . . to start the conversation afresh, not have it head to this most dangerous of directions again — the absolutely inevitable.”

LaSalle revisits this theme again and again, tying all the stories together in an interesting way. A Mount Holyoke student questions her choices while in Paris for a semester abroad. A college football player kicks himself for being suckered in by a disingenuous recruiter. And in the title story, a down-on-his-luck American looks back on a failed scam and failed romance in Buenos Aires.

LaSalle also crafts compact gems of traditional storytelling that pack just as strong a creative and emotional punch. “The Christmas Bus,” “The Actor’s Face,” and “Brilliant Billy Dubbs on the Ocean Floor,” all demonstrate how short stories can be experimental without losing their accessibility.

It is clear that LaSalle is a major talent in this often overlooked genre. From illustrating the uncertainty and earnestness of the college years to making the rare-book trade into an enterprise fraught with intrigue, his stories are both thought-provoking and extremely satisfying. Tell Borges If You See Him,