Be assured that Nam Le's brilliant debut short story collection, "The Boat," will quicken your pulse and awaken every nerve in your being. For avid readers who have hungered for stories that can transport them physically, intellectually and emotionally, stories so well-structured and narrated they appear to reinvent the form itself, the literary American Idol is Nam Le.

Born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, 29-year-old Le's dynamic prose and remarkable range of subjects and points of view defy explanation.

These seven stories are set all over the globe: Iowa City, New York City, Tehran, Hiroshima, Australia, Colombia and aboard a trawler in the South China Sea. One expects lapses of credibility with settings so diverse. But Nam Le's photographic eye and pitch-perfect ear capture each place so well the reader will have to remind himself that he's reading and is not actually standing on a bluff in Australia where "the town glinted like a single eye," or walking on Summit Street in Iowa with its "double-storied houses, their smooth lawns sloping down to the sidewalks like golf greens."

It's not a requirement to read this collection by beginning with the first story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice"; however, the first story comes closest to revealing the creative processes behind Nam Le's art.

In the story, a Vietnam-born writer named Nam is on deadline at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when his father, with whom he has shared a questionably abusive relationship, comes to visit. They haven't seen each other in three years.

Nam first convinces himself that his writers' block can be attributed to not wanting to exploit "the Vietnam thing," subject matter he's shied away from except for one story about the Vietnamese boat people.

Nam interviews his father about the "re-education camps" and the massacre.

As a 14-year-old boy lying in a muddy ditch beneath his mother when the Americans began shooting, Nam's father says, "I felt my mother's body jumping on top of mine; it kept jumping for a long time then everywhere was the sound of helicopters. ..."

Nam says he wants to write his father's story so people "will remember." His father insists, "You want their pity ... only you'll remember. I'll remember. They will read and clap their hands and forget."

Both are right, of course. What begins as a clever story about how stories are written and what writers will co-opt in order to make their work salable and bankable, deepens into a magnificent tour de force about the bonds and betrayals between a father and son, betrayals that often take root and grow knottier over time. The final twist in this story, shocking and earned, will leave you, as it does Nam, "so full of wanting, I thought it would flood my heart."

The collection continues to astonish with each successive story, pitting love against honor, denouncing compassion in favor of pride, and always, always questioning the limits of and the necessity for sacrifice, most often those sacrifices parents make for their children.

In "Meeting Elise" a successful, middle-age New York City painter who may have colorectal cancer hopes to reunite with the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby.

"Even before she could speak," Henry says, "she'd look at me, unblinking, bringing me down to an accusable level ... I hadn't wanted her and she knew it." Now, on the day of Elsie's cello performance at Carnegie Hall, Henry hopes to rectify years of estrangement in a single luncheon.

Le structures his story and conducts Henry's voice so well, we don't see what the story is up to until it's upon us. Not, after all, the story of a man seeking forgiveness, but instead the portrait of a frightened, angry, grieving man battling his own mortality -- and losing.

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