Many universities in the United States have active presses. Unlike profit-driven publishing houses, university presses focus on areas of limited popular appeal, usually specific areas of scholarly research -- women's studies, Marxism, economics, history. Many of the books are used as textbooks, so they at least pay for the costs of publication.

Often, university presses are financed by grants, donations and budgets that support their areas of expertise. Known primarily for nonfiction, some university presses also print poems, stories, and novels. The creative publications often have limited popular appeal, but are appreciated by other writers.

Readers familiar with Louisiana State University Press know that it publishes high quality poetry. Current and former North Carolina poet laureates Kathryn Stripling Byer and Fred Chappell both publish with LSU Press. North Carolina poets James Applewhite, Betty Adcock and Michael Chitwood are among the dozens of fine poets whose work is published by LSU.

LSU Press once had a thriving original fiction series. Twenty-eight years ago, LSU Press published John Kennedy Toole's novel, "A Confederacy of Dunces," which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize -- the only time a publication by a small press has won that award.

Sales for fiction published by university presses are spotty and LSU abandoned its fiction series in the 1990s. But in 2004, they asked Michael Griffith, editor at Southern Review, if he'd be interested in reviving the fiction publishing arm of LSU Press on a limited basis. Griffith founded the Yellow Shoe Series, and since 2005 has published one collection of short stories per year. He looked for work by "terrific writers who were having trouble placing their work with the big NYC houses ... who tend to be wary, perhaps for good reason, of literary fiction." Griffith found writers primarily by referrals from other writers.

The first book published was Nicholas Montemarano's "If the Sky Falls" in 2005, followed by R.T. Smith's "Uke River Delivers" in 2006. The most recent publication was John Fulton's "The Animal Girl."

Fulton's stories are reminiscent of the work of the late Andre Dubus. Longer than most short stories -- the five works in this volume total 174 pages -- they don't feel plodding or bloated. Like Dubus' work, Fulton's fiction is written in a rich, lyrical prose that is both precise and resonant.

In the title story, 17-year-old Leah finds herself in jail after her father turns her in, and what scares her about being locked up is "the numbing aloneness of incarceration, the lack of detail, the simple repetition of bars, the orphaned bareness of the single toilet in the corner ... the weird echo of someone whistling somewhere down the corridor of cages." The phrases about aloneness, the repetition of bars, the orphaned bareness and the corridor of cages contain the precision of observation of the best fiction and the compressed musicality and rhythm of poetry.

The precision and compression, that care with the writing, both stylistically and thematically, makes Fulton's collection stand above many short story collections published out of New York.

"The Animal Girl" isn't only a story about how an isolated 17-year-old can arrive at the place where she will fabricate an horrific act of betrayal against a man who has been kind to her. It is also about how a 17-year-old deals with the loss of a mother through death, the loss of a father through love, the seeming impossibility of losing her walls and fences and self-imposed prisons through simple acts of engaging others in the world.

Fulton's work weaves multiple themes together without making it feel as if he's trying to do too many things at once. The multiple themes, essential to understanding his characters, fit together naturalistically. His fictional characters are rendered with the complexity we afford the people in our own lives.

Griffith is establishing a body of fiction that may make LSU Press as well known for fine fiction as it is for fine poetry. The books published so far have been excellent and stylistically diverse. The work by Smith, a past resident of North Carolina, is unabashedly Southern, from its locations and language to its Gothic elements. Nicholas Montemarano's work is a hybrid of academic fiction, told with a sort of literary experimentation applied to stories self-consciously focused on issues of violence that could be sensationalistic were it not for his style. Add to that Fulton's carefully wrought Northern lyricism.

It speaks well of Griffith's skill as an editor that the Yellow Shoe Fiction Series, though only a few years old, has already presented a body of work that LSU Press can be proud to have published.

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