Greg Hollingshead's new collection, White Buick (Oolichan), contains fifteen nearly impeccable stories. Hollingshead knows how to write: there is nothing superfluous here, his characters are present, the tensions are real enough. A little too much of the hospital perhaps (hospitals, like dream sequences are too frequently too tempting to fiction writers), but all of these stories are compelling in at least a literary way. Holligshead has learned from Hemingway and from Carver and he doesn't imitate them. But there remains, on putting the book aside, a patterned, literary aftertaste rather than that indelible imprint of imagined experience that results at times from rougher, less crafted work.