"There's a way in which you can make the readers laugh until suddenly they're crying and they don't know what hit them," says Amy Hempel of her first collection of short stories, Reasons to Live (1985). Through three collections, Hempel has pioneered a spare and compressed prose style that blends humor and sadness, grief and the quick one-liner, to create a moving fiction of short moments. Her work, with its reliance on metaphor and the associative leaps of characters' minds, often reads much like poetry. The result, as a critic for The Washington Post (7 May 1985) said, is that "Hempel makes small and cryptic moments explode with suggestion."

The fact that her stories are compressed and often short, some no more than a page, has led many critics to associate her work with minimalism. Hempel is mentioned alongside Mary Robison, Ann Beattie, and Raymond Carver--three writers who are considered to...