The prospect of reviewing a new book by Cynthia Ozick gave me great pleasure, since I believe her two previous collections—"The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories" and "Bloodshed and Three Novellas"—to be perhaps the finest work in short fiction by a contemporary writer; certainly it is the work in that genre that has most appealed to me. Then the bound galleys of "Levitation" arrived, subtitled "Five Fictions." Immediately a voice whispered, "On guard! Why fictions? Why not stories, why not novellas, as the subtitles of the two earlier volumes plainly declared their contents to be? What is a fiction, anyway?" A quick glance through the galleys provided a calming, commonsensical answer. Some of these five pieces seemed to be stories, while others, although made up and works of the imagination, were not what we think of as tales. But a closer reading has proved unsettling. Each...