In R.T. Smith's short story "Story," one of the tales collected in this year's "New Stories From the South" anthology, the protagonist -- a retired high school English teacher who is the victim of a home invasion -- stands in his living room, listening to the burglar ransacking his wife's jewelry box. He recalls the "unremarkable" short story, about a shady Manhattan barber's dissatisfaction with the world, that he had been reading in The New Yorker magazine before the break-in. "He wanted to return to the neurotic barber and the irritating New Yorker writer's fashionable ennui," Smith writes. "He would like to will [the burglar] into the ink, onto the page."

It's a cheeky moment, and not only because willing that odd burglar into print is exactly what Smith has done in writing "Story." It's hard to imagine that unnamed New Yorker story and its barber making it into "New Stories From the South 2007."

This 22nd edition of Algonquin Books' esteemed anthology of Southern fiction is guest edited by Edward P. Jones. In Jones, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for "The Known World," the series has found an editor with little patience for stories of bourgeois entitlement. Characters of means are rare in this anthology, and none of them make it to the end of their stories without suffering some kind of calamity, whether rising floodwaters, ruinous alcoholism or a fatal, all-consuming inferno.

It's not just the upper crust who suffer mightily in "New Stories"; it seems as though Jones was listening Hank Williams when editing the anthology and was determined not to let anyone out of this world alive. This cavalcade of misery reaches its logical conclusion in August'n Maes' "Beauty and Virtue," about a brutal Missouri Bootheel serial killer. The story is elegantly crafted but nearly impossible to read, featuring as it does the graphic rape and murder of a mentally retarded 12-year-old girl.

Moments of levity do break through the gloom in the anthology. In Rick Bass' excellent "Goats," a hapless pair of Texas high school boys attempt to raise cattle with only a station wagon and inadequate fencing, with predictably disastrous results. George Singleton's "Which Rocks We Choose" forces its hero to make a jump from the most earthbound pursuit imaginable -- rock farming -- to the lofty and ridiculous halls of academia, as he enrolls in a low-residency master's program in Southern cultural studies. ("Man," he comments to his wife when he sees that his textbook contains a chapter called "BBQ, Ticks, Cottonmouths, and Moonshine," "what's left to learn?")

The anthology's loveliest story by far is also its most optimistic: "The Safe," by Tim Gautreaux, follows the denizens of a Louisiana junkyard whose lives are changed by the unexpected treasure they find inside a discarded heavy-duty safe.

Jones chooses a number of titles that push hard against traditional notions of whose stories "Southern stories" tell. These pieces are not multicultural tokens; they are, indeed, some of the best in the anthology. In Toni Jensen's "At the Powwow Hotel," a mystic cornfield sprouts overnight outside a Blackfoot-run motel in West Texas. Stephanie Powell Watts' "Unassigned Territory" follows two Jehovah's Witnesses into a well-to-do North Carolina woman's living room. And "Bela Lugosi's Dead," by Angela Threatt, ventures into the (I assume) previously unexplored literary terrain of teenage African-American Goths in 1980s Norfolk.

"New Stories 2007" suffers as a sit-down read from an unavoidable consequence of the series' organizational scheme: The stories are presented in sequence by authors' last names, and so pieces that might have resonated with each other instead live half a book apart by accident of alphabetization. And several stories, such as the difficult "Beauty and Virtue" and the two bleak tales that bracket it, would have benefited from some space in between them.

"New Stories" is a book to dip into and out of, not to read front to back on an Indian summer afternoon.

The New Yorker story in R.T. Smith's "Story" wouldn't make the cut here for one other interesting reason: Whether by accident or design, Jones hasn't picked a single story from that magazine, the literary establishment's most prominent home for the form. Instead, Jones pays tribute through his selections to the kinds of magazines that first published his own work.

This year's new stories from the South come from a constellation of academic and independent journals, from The Georgia Review and Shenandoah to Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and The Oxford American -- the kinds of journals that advance the vibrant cause of Southern writing, and that, as Jones writes in his introduction, "say yes to us when others say no."