before, but six more are drawn from previous volumes. Written at different periods in Doctorow's career -- the earliest comes from 1968 -- they cover an equally wide range of topics and styles. The settings range from early 20th-century Galicia to a near-future New York, from a Waco-like cult compound to an Eastern European mafioso's restaurant, and Doctorow takes advantage of the short form to try out different styles: one piece is told entirely in direct speech, another in diary form. In a brief preface, he contrasts the demands of novels, in which the work "participates in its composition" and "you write to find out what you're writing", with short stories, which, he says, arrive in his head entire, "self-announcing, their voice and circumstances decided and immutable". Some of the stories that read like exercises probably were. The story "Heist" provided the seed of the novel City of God , while "Liner Notes: the Songs of Billy Bathgate" provided a character name, though, confusingly, nothing else, for a later novel. Others, however, come across as alternately overburdened and underdeveloped. One of the new pieces, "Wakefield", updates a 19th-century story by Nathaniel Hawthorne about a man who "without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment" leaves his wife and household, moves to an adjacent street and lives there for 20 years. Doctorow's version makes the protagonist a New York lawyer, gives him a berth in the family garage and introduces a set of bizarre plot trappings -- a gang of