Tales by a fantasist who would rather be fishing.

In "Heart of Whitenesse," which Waldrop himself seems to view as his most compacted and densely allusive work, Christopher Marlowe is sent up the frozen Thames on a secret mission to kill Dr. Faustus. Following a few preliminaries, it opens:

"I'd come up from the covers and poured myself a cup of malmsey you could have drowned a pygmy in, then dressed as best I could, and made my way out into this cold world.

"Shoreditch was dismal in the best of times, and this wasn't it."

My own favorite story is "Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?," which manages to capture what life was like for a teenager in the 1960s -- and then caps this by depicting members of the high school class of 1969 as they prepare for their 20th reunion. This anthem for a lost generation climaxes with the band Distressed Flag Sale reuniting, for one night only, to play the legendary "Life Is Like That." Years before, a riot broke out at a mammoth concert in Miami and the band members were busted -- just before the song's world premiere. It was never heard by anyone. "We were gonna play it that night, and the world was gonna change," says a now middle-aged and very drunk band member, "but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we were the ones that changed, not them." But now on an evening suffused with mono no aware-- and Waldrop uses the Japanese term for nostalgia and the sad passage of the years -- the band finally launches into "Life Is Like That" and brings this story to a thrilling, perfect '60s climax.

That recurrent sense of what might have been pervades Waldrop's fiction, though his most famous excursion into alternate history, "Ike at the Mike," isn't included in Things Will Never Be the Same. For that -- and for "God's Hooks!" and the amazing post-holocaust Indian tractor-pull story "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" -- you'll need to pick up Howard Who?, the author's first collection now reprinted by Small Beer Press. In truth, you really do need both these books. Why? Because in "Ike at the Mike," Sen. E. Aaron Presley, mulling over whether to make a bid for the presidency, attends a White House dinner honoring the great old jazzman Ike Eisenhower. Later that evening, sipping whisky alone in his study, the charismatic young senator wonders about the course of his own life and what might have been.

Italo Calvino once said that he was "known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself." Much the same could be said of Howard Waldrop. You never know what he'll come up with next, but somehow it's always a Waldrop story. Read the work of this wonderful writer, a man who has devoted his life to his art -- and to fishing. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.