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Not having much time for novels lately, I’ve read some great short stories, all in The New Yorker, and wanted to pass along these gems to interested readers.  Raj, Bohemian by Hari Kunzru starts out like all the other postmodern, plotless stories that seem to emerge from a void to which they return with barely a ripple.  We meet a group of young people living a seemingly idealistic and artfully managed (though silly) existence.  They have parties, they hang out, etc. The narrator is one of the group and quite pleased their collective lifestlyle. Scoffing at, yet somehow buying into this picture, the reader (at least this reader) is as shocked as the hero by the actual reality of his friends’ lives, only revealed because of Raj, a newcomer and a ‘wheeler-dealer.’  Only after the sordid reality is unveiled does one look back and question, what was Constantine doing in Sunita’s apartment?  How did these people live? And when the narrator sees the truth and goes on his mission of revenge it is chilling, like Raskilnikov bent on murder in Crime and Punishment.  I liked it a lot.  The Bellringer, by John Burnside is a quiet story with an edge.  As in William Trevor, ordinary lives are revealed, simple events unfold, a life is being lived.  Burnside doesn’t quite have Trevor’s mastery of the form, but this was a good story.  (Speaking of Trevor, he was mentioned in the Globe Ideas section today, a passing reference in a book review by Richard Eder, comparing him to the American short story writer Tobias Wolff, who in the end falls a little short, for “Trevor’s blade can barely seem to move as it draws heart’s blood.”  Well said!)  Finally, I was floored by Jeffrey Eugenides’ Great Experiment.  As an indictment of both intellectualism and capitalism, as a sorrowful rumination upon our natures, our illusions and our history, it reminded me of Steinbeck’s The Winter of our Dicontent.  So, three great stories, my pantheon of writers of short fiction enlarged by two, and I think I might try something by Wolff who is, according to Eder, ‘the closest we have to William Trevor.’