national mood. The opening of the volume offers front matter and O’Brien’s introduction, where he warns of “disintegration” in American letters—both the lazy commercial formula and shallow imitation of European avant-gardes—then explains his selection tests of substance and form and his star-based ranking. The fiction begins with The Dark City, a twilight study of a suburban father whose evening routines and gardening yield to a recurring vision of a silent, menacing city; continues with I’m a Fool, a stablehand’s rueful confession after lying about his identity to impress a girl at the races; and follows with The Death of Murdo, in which a Romani chief, newly healed, engineers a fatal test to secure his tribe’s faith in a successor. It then turns to An Unknown Warrior, opening on a lone soldier entering a snow-shrouded Westminster Abbey. (This is an automatically generated summary.)