It’s hard, these days, not to be suspicious of experimental writing. So much of it seems to be produced by ego-happy no-talents whose main reasons for writing in an unorthodox manner are that (a) they are incapable of writing in the usual way, and (b) they know that it is a great deal easier to attract attention in some critical quarters by being different than by being good. So familiar is this phenomenon in the land of letters that when a genuinely gifted writer, having a very clear idea of what he is doing and why, attempts to reach us by an unfamiliar route, we are often, understandably, less than willing to pack up our gear and meet him halfway. Guy Davenport is such a writer. Apples and Pears is his fourth volume of stories[1] (the first three were Tatlin!, Da Vinci’s Bicycle, and Eclogues), and he has yet to give us anything that an average contemporary reader would recognize as a conventional short story. Not for him the isolated incident, the limited setting and time frame, that have been the earmarks of the form since Edgar Allan Poe; not for him the deadeningly spare prose, the commonplace characters, and the no-ideas-but-in-things approach of the Bobbie Ann Masons and the Raymond Carvers. To Davenport—whose wide range of tastes and talents has been amply demonstrated by his poetry (Flowers and Leaves), classical translations (Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman), scholarly editions (The Intelligence of