Here [in Smoke and Other Early Stories] are fourteen stories, startlingly strange, cranky even, but also as raw and exciting as swigs of poteen….

What in their compelling way these stories do is to mythicize cosmopolis, in its most audacious and grotesque modern manifestation, as the urbs of New York, New York. Even the tiny clutch of these fictions that are about Europe and country people, or about a century other than our own, read like modern New York fiction in potential: as if all earlier times and all other places were to be lived only as shadows of that coming Molochian real. Characteristically, when the Polish farmer Pontos marries off his daughter Theeg—she of the inherited silver eyelashes, the visions of mother earth, the crippled feet a ritualized object in helpless little boots, on a litter littered with cakes and wine—the farmer does so in...