The brainchild of pop-lit goldenboy Nick Hornby, SPEAKING WITH THE ANGEL brings together 12 of today's hippest, hottest, coolest, nowest authors from both sides of the pond --- including Helen Fielding, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Melissa Bank and Hornby himself. Though extremely bankable in its abundance of talent and trendiness (right down to the kitschy cover art), this collection of first-person narratives was actually compiled in the name of charity; specifically, TreeHouse, a school for autistic children attended by Hornby's young son. All the more reason to acquire this all original, often hilarious, always eclectic collection.

One of the best stories in the collection comes from the amazingly well-connected Hornby. Narrated by a bouncer turned art gallery security guard, "Nipple Jesus" delivers a modern parable on the foolishness and intolerance characteristic of both critics and defenders of controversial artwork --- such as the portrait of the crucified Christ created from thousands of tiny nipples cut from porno magazines featured in Hornby's story. A long overdue smack in the face for the laughably ignorant censors, scarily religious zealots, controversy pandering artists, and free-speech soapboxers, "Nipple Jesus" should be required reading for those people waiting in line to gawk at the next "sensation" exhibit.

I recently wrote a scathing article about the "megalomaniac and overrated" Dave Eggers and now, shamefaced, I must eat my words (well, word...I still stand behind the former criticism). Put simply, "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned" is a thoughtfully, compassionately, dare I say poetically? scripted story. The dare-to-be-different narrative of the collection, it is written from the perspective of a dog --- not just any dog, Steven the dog, a very, very fast dog, a dog so in love with running and jumping and the world, "Hooooooooooo!," that you're left feeling terribly embarrassed when he says, "I feel good and I live on and run and run and look at the people and hear their stupid conversations coming from their slits for mouths and terrible eyes."

Roddy Doyle's homage to the male mid-life crisis, "The Slave," is a hilarious monologue on the perpetual inner dialogue running on in the mind of the 42-year-old protagonist: "I never wanted to be a man who wore slippers...[n]ow, I won't get out of bed if I'm not certain they're right beside me."

Another absolute standout in the collection is Patrick Marber's "Peter Shelley," a sweet and funny and poignant portrait of teenage courtship. As a completely undetected voyeur, the reader is privy to the awkward, anxious, befuddled, hurried, but always tender sexual exploration, and eventually epiphany, unfolding between Marber's two 14-year-old burgeoning punkrockers. And in the end, "Peter Shelley" reminds us of a time --- my god, so long ago --- when we felt like we "could eat the world."

Like Marber, Zadie Smith, author of the epic WHITE TEETH, and Colin Firth, literary newcomer and star of Hornby's memoir-turned-movie FEVER PITCH, mine the familiar territory of male adolescence. Unfortunately, and somewhat shockingly in the case of Smith, their attempts are considerably less successful than Marber's.

In "I'm The Only One" Smith offers a mildly poignant and uncharacteristically (that is, if after only one novel, we can consider anything an author does "uncharacteristic") simple sketch of a teenage boy who takes a cruel yet loving sort of pride in parading his friend --- who, at 14, stands at 6 foot 9 inches --- in front of his older sister, "as if the fact that he was so tall was something to do with [him]." And while Firth's "The Department of Nothing" is actually a very respectable, and certainly valiant considering the company, first attempt at story writing, the piece --- a long and at times touching tale about a boy and the wide-eyed awe and unmitigated love he feels for his grandmother and her fantastical stories --- leaves you with the feeling that author is forcing his way into the mind of his teenage protagonist, maybe trying just a little too hard to be vulnerable and sincere and funny.

Speaking of trying too hard to be funny --- or clever, edgy, scandalous and every other adjective you can think of that, when preceded by the phrase "trying to hard to be," spells disaster --- what the hell were Irvine Welsh, John O'Farrell, and Helen Fielding thinking when they wrote their stories? Welsh's "Catholic Guilt You (Know You Love It)" is a boringly vulgar tale about some generic, homophobic meathead who drops dead while screwing his best friend's sister and, as some sort of cruel and ironic penance, is doomed to rape his male friends till he "cease[es] to feel the guilt." Subtlety has never been Welsh's strong suit, but in this case it seems neither is plot, character development, style, or theme.

Sadly, John O'Farrell's "Walking Against The Wind" and Helen Fielding's "Luckybitch" suffer from the most debilitating of all literary maladies, It-Seemed-Like-A-Really-Good-Idea-At-The-Time Syndrome. Our hearts go out to both authors --- O'Farrell for thinking that chronicling one man's love of mime and the obstacles he faces in this blatantly anti-mime world of ours over the course of 30 pages would make a sustainably hilarious and satiric story; and Fielding for not living up to her Bridget Jones certified wit potential with her brief tale about an old lady who, like all old ladies claim to be, was "the former Grace Kelly of Hampshire" and a minx in her day, though is now reduced to hitting the panic button from the bathroom floor of her nursing home. To be fair, both stories are funny for the first 5 pages, it's just that come page 6 the joke grows very old very quickly.

Simultaneous to finishing SPEAKING WITH THE ANGEL I came across Walter Kirn's review of Rick Moody's DEMONOLOGY in the New York Times. Unresolved about how to handle the fact that this charitable, star-studded collection had more than a few less than great selections, I decided to adopt the sentiments expressed in the first sentence of Kirn's piece as my official stance on the book: Good short story collections, like good record albums, are almost always hit-and-miss affairs --- successful if they include 3 or four great tracks, wildly successful if they have five. Into which category, then, does SPEAKING WITH THE ANGEL fall? If considering it "wildly successful" will prompt you to buy this book and donate some much needed money to a very worthy cause, I'd be willing to call it a work of unparalleled literary genius.

   --- Reviewed by Sarah Brennan

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