Fascination By William Boyd Knopf, 277 pp., $24 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (6) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Soon after, I began William Boyd's new story collection Fascination. (His 2003 novel Any Human Heart was, among other things, a nod to Powell.) Many pieces have an agreeable notebook quality (indeed, one story is titled "Notebook #9"), hopscotching across time, place, and source, as in "The Mind/Body Problem," which mixes a weight trainer's dealings in muscle-amping supplements with philosophy text passages. And the genres are also, gleefully, all over the map: a Chekhovian episode starring Chekhov himself, Updikean adultery on the Cape. But the story that stunned me was "A Haunting," in which an architect, possessed, sabotages his career by drawing mysterious x shapes on an all-but-final design. Spoiler: The cross frenzy leads him to the work of a Scottish engineer who identified waves that "remember" their source: "In the paper, he proposed a mathematical symbol. . . . [T]he shape that ensued resembled an elongated version of the white x on the blue ground of the Scottish flag."

Later, I watched a Law & Order: SVU episode that hinged on some x'd boxes on a fertility clinic's consent form. On Christmas I was looking at a globe, letting my gaze coast along the grid, and wound up scrutinizing an unfamiliar name: Thailand's Isthmus of Kra. Two days later came news of the tsunami, waves generated by a seismic eruption, devastating Thailand and other countries.

This is all true. Though it goes unremarked by Boyd, fascination originated as the term for the evil eye.