There’s nothing better than a book that’s smarter, funnier and better formed than you. The unifying feature - beyond sheer, exquisite brilliance - is that all of these books are short story collections that are in some way experimental. Experimental meaning they have unconventional structures, abandon plot, blur genre boundaries or incorporate randomness and word play. Some stories follow the logic of myth, or call into view the constructed quality of the text itself. But whatever they do, they do it well.

Some of these books may be out of print or hard to find; if a local bookstore up north can’t get them, try www.used.addall.com.

I’m tempted to devote this entire column to Stuart Dybek’s Coast of Chicago; however, using whatever modicum of self-control I have left, I have refrained. Dybek’s slender volume of short stories is a literary masterpiece. His fiction departs from the strict realms of realism as he immerses the reader in the surreal and lyrical mysteries of memory, emotions, and imagination, evoking the gritty mysteries of everyday life with an entirely fresh voice. The result is a tension drawn from the familiar details of urban landscape contrasted against the convoluted meanderings of memory and perception. A child’s collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. Dehydrated milk becomes the catalyst for a young man to examine his life, both what’s passed and what’s to come. A conga drummer is lead on a journey through the subways by images of his dead girlfriend.

The Coast of Chicago is about people on the brink, walking with one foot in two different worlds. It’s a heartbreaking anthem of loss and joy simultaneously, a veritable instruction manual for how to live, and also, perhaps more importantly, how to write.

Stacey Levine’s collection of short stories, My Horse and Other Stories is about as odd as they come. Her stories are razor-sharp otherworldly portraits, claustrophobic domestic studies and surrealist psychological journeys. Levine is fascinated by the impermeability of experience - particularly our bodies and our impulses - and delves into this fascination in bizarre and ultimately fulfilling ways.

In The Hump, a woman discovers a “flesh-colored hump” on her shoulder that becomes alarmingly consuming, both physically and psychologically. “It might have been possible that the hump jiggled and swayed somewhat less now than it had when it first appeared, a month before; it seemed harder, and being harder, it also seemed smaller.” At their tamest, Levine’s stories are disquieting. Her work is fiercely logical and lyric down to the last clause. Like a tapeworm, her stories settle in your gut and refuse to be expelled.

What do you get when you cross James Joyce with Amy Hempel? In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William Gass. Gass creates five beautiful and wholly different forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass’s Midwestern dreamers are like the “grotesques” of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce’s Dubliners. To quote Eliot Fremont-Smith of The New York Times, “These stories scrape the nerve and pierce the heart.”

This collection is a must-read for anyone even nominally interested in literature, form, or just how far and how well the English language can travel. I’m jealous of all of you who haven’t read this collection yet - you’re in for a left-brain-blowing good time.

Oh, Joy Williams, I love you. I suppose I should just put that out there now. While I do love her novels (particularly State of Grace), I’m going to push her short fiction, which I may love more. Taking Care, Escapes and Honored Guest are all replete with the kind of quirky defamiliarization Williams is known for. Case in point: “The child had frustrated her again. The child would not go to sleep. She was upstairs wandering around making ‘cotton candy’ in her bone-china bunny mug. ‘Cotton candy’ was Kleenex sogged in water.”

Williams finds whatever is at the emotional heart of her narrative and proceeds to ignore it for the duration of the story, focusing instead on the objects immediately surrounding the hurricane’s eye. The result is a world with misplaced tensions that looks like the territory we’re familiar with, only far more heightened and tightly wound. Williams is smart about life and astute about love in ways that make you question not only your own perceptions, but indeed, your own experiences.

Rachel Meier is a used and new book buyer and the proprietor of the website www.readafuckingbook.com, where she is obnoxious online.