Cohen has published four novels as well as a good many stories; Night Flights consists of five new stories and ten selections from his earlier work. The stories seem to fall into at least three distinct modes: some are almost wholly realistic ("Vogel," "The Hanged Man," and "Brain Dust" for example); some are abstract, bizarre, and parabolic ("Heyfitz," "The Secret," "A Literary History of Anton"); and some occupy a territory between these two extremes ("Columbus and the Fat Lady," "Janice," and perhaps "Brothers"). Almost all the stories in the abstract mode are failures—not because of their difficulty (and Cohen is on the whole a difficult writer) but because they are not true works of fiction. Their author obviously has no real interest in the characters, events, and places of these stories except as they can be made to serve thematically. The other two types (the realistic and...