SHORT STORIE S:Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails: An Anthology of StoriesEdited by Philip Ó Ceallaigh, The Stinging Fly Press, 227pp. €12.99

EVERYONE IS A CRITIC, and neither am I. Writers increasingly represent constituencies, and critics tend to set a conceptual grid of their own making over the work and then evaluate how well the content conforms. The more marketing departments seek to categorise literature along identifiably cultural lines, the more homogeneous writing has become.

I once heard Derek Walcott say, echoing Orwell, that the best writers are like glass: you see directly through to the story. Codes and manipulations are removed from the narrative; the writer’s identity is secondary to the dream of fiction created on the page, and the characters and their situations come alive to such an extent that as the narrative unfolds the author fades.

So in opening Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, an anthology of new stories from the Stinging Fly Press, I was looking for these invisible composers at work, who make the kind of fiction that engages the imagination, emotion and intellect – stories we remember for too many reasons to count.

Any collection of work by different authors can be as difficult to label as it can be to review. Why are these particular 22 stories from eight countries put together? In his introduction Philip Ó Ceallaigh outlines one decisive quality: despite differences in style and theme “they display the freshness and clarity that comes of rendering something simple”.

Authors represented include Christine Dwyer Hickey, Julian Gough, Kevin Barry and Goran Petrovic. Some of the names are relatively new, and Ó Ceallaigh performs the delicate balancing act that any publication faces in the current recession. Let me say that the best stories in this fine collection come from both camps.

Brian Kirk's The Girl in the Window, about a stockbroker who watches a girl undress for him in a window across the street from his office, conjures up the fantasy economics that dug this country into its present circumstances. It is accomplished and convincing. Emily Firetog's The Boyshas the protagonist James visiting his father with a boyfriend after the suicide of a family member. No sentimentality here. Instead Firetog produces a restrained portrait of a father lost in his loss, complete with pitch-perfect dialogue and some evocative passages: "A fuse had blown in him and he was swallowed, gone. Only my mother saw her son in him anymore."

Julian Gough's allegory of golf and novels, starring Tiger Woods as the Great American Novelist, is a merciless reportage on the manufacturing and promotion of identity in contemporary fiction. With that set-up, Gough has a field day. The Serbian writer Goran Petrovic's Our Fellow Creaturespresents a grim meditation on the architecture of how we spend our time. The atmosphere is captivating, though the Marquez-flavoured ending feels out of place (which may be the point). Also atmospheric is The Girls and the Dogsby Kevin Barry, whose anonymous speaker hides out in a caravan near Gort. A Gothic Irish mix of witchcraft and desperadoes, these characters deal in fruits forbidden to polite society, and it works.

David Mohan is a writer who has a story to tell and gets on with it. His terrific Some Facts About Sonomawill appeal to fans of Denis Johnson. His spare writing paints with a generous stroke the gritty but spacious life of American highways, diners and lost daughters. In a different American space, Andrew Fox's Blizzardis set at Christmas in New York as Adam finishes his delivery routine for the evening. The irony of a man who finds addresses not having one himself is tuned to a quiet hum. Fox captures effortlessly and with art the cold spaces in American life that many Irish have known all too well. Christine Dwyer Hickey locates disconnection in the relentless ordinary in her moving portrait of a man who tries to text his daughter back into his life. Benjamin Arda Doty also impresses.

When Flannery O’Connor observed that competence by itself was deadly, she was referring, I think, to the teaching of fiction in workshops and also to what is unteachable, the alchemy that takes technique beyond its own mastery and into literature.

A few of these stories exhibit deadly competence. In Madeleine D'Arcy's Waiting for the Bulleta Carver-like emotional flatness describes a dinner party at which an avowed Sarah Palin supporter is taught a lesson through a session of Russian roulette with a toy gun. The only danger here is that the reader will not duck in time as the Obvious Metaphor goes off. And in Charlotte Grimshaw's The Master Planthe narrator's e-mail correspondence with the man whose book she reviewed in the TLS is interspersed with lots of wine, brand names, a friend's trip to Paris for a mysterious painting, absurd plot points and characters so insubstantial they cast no shadows. Having said that, no anthology in existence will completely please everyone.

The search for the "New" in writing is not new. One commentator complains of the effect on literature of the "pursuit of novelty in the expression of ideas which may be regarded as the fashionable craze of the day". That is Longinus, writing in the first century. In Sharp Sticks, Driven Nailsthe editor is in search not of gimmickry but only the good story, and in this excellent collection from the Stinging Fly Press Philip Ó Ceallaigh has found plenty. I recommend it highly. Such quality as this deserves readers and will win them.

Gerard Donovan's most recent novel is Julius Winsome. His short stories have appeared in Tatlerand Granta, and new work by him is included in the upcoming issue of Francis Ford Coppolas Zoetrope: All-Story