If you don't yet know the work of Evan S. Connell, what are you waiting for? Best known for his novel "Mrs. Bridge" and his biography of Custer, "Son of the Morning Star," Connell has been writing award-winning short stories for 50 years.

The stories in "Lost in Uttar Pradesh" -- seven of which are published here for the first time -- vary in setting and length, but it is not hard to identify the common thread running through them: Connell's characters, whether recurring or simply enjoying a walk-on, find themselves suddenly shellacked by the realization that the world is not as it appears -- moral, ordered, progressing toward some comprehensible end -- but is, in fact, the opposite. Everything and everyone is vulnerable; the fictive worlds we write for ourselves can be inverted on a dime.

In "Lion," the opening story and one of the collection's masterpieces, a woman watches from her kitchen window as a mountain lion slowly follows a pregnant, bawling cow up a hill. The lion is young, and he knows he can't drag the cow's carcass on its own; he is patiently herding the animal to a more convenient location for slaughter. The cow is half-mad with terror.

Every player in this tableau of helplessness knows what will happen: The cow will be eaten by the lion. There is no way to prevent it. The woman's husband is away, and she is pregnant herself; but she leaves her cabin to follow the procession, hoping to break it up somehow. The lion, aroused, looks at her with "perfectly human lucidity" and what she sees, essentially, is natural law laid bare: She is in the wilderness, on a "prehistoric ridge where nothing mattered except food." The order she seeks is an illusion, "surely ... the utmost conceit, yet she could not feel otherwise." Connell leaves the woman -- and us -- back at her window, the predator and prey now out of sight, staring into the "terrifying silence" she has, as if thunderstruck, finally apprehended.

The Pacific Theater, the atomic bomb and Vietnam loom large in the book, and the stories often read like a survivor's account. "Guadalcanal" is a conversation between an injured Marine captain and a Navy pilot with catarrhal fever. Both men are hospitalized; the pilot wants to know what it's like on the front lines, since that's where he's headed. The Marine tells him a horrific story about one of his soldiers, a 15-year-old without "a spark of humanity," before drifting off to sleep.

In the terrific title story, "Lost in Uttar Pradesh," it is the narrator's Uncle Gates who, drunk and "listing a few degrees like somebody on a sailboat," cannot stop talking about a trip to India, during which he may or may not have lost his mind. The story reads like a fever dream -- vivid, affecting and just coherent enough in its parade of grotesqueries to leave its mark on the reader.

If these narratives sometimes feel less like fully realized stories and more like fragments of an ongoing conversation Connell is having with the world, so be it -- what he's working to do here is express both rage and its futility, and it's fascinating to watch this theme morph and play out in various scenarios.

We live in a fallen country that will not acknowledge its decline -- that's what perturbs Proctor Bemis, the title character in one of the stories, a recurring character in Connell's stable of protagonists and possibly the author's best invention. He's an obese, country-clubbing Republican entering his twilight years, who feels suddenly "like an Eskimo" among his former friends. He finds that they have relaxed into their own beliefs, which like their buffets at parties, are "sumptuous, imperial, and a whopping tribute to an exemplary bourgeois life." His late-blooming apostasy, though an embarrassment to his wife, is deeply felt. He learns the United States planned to gas 5 million people in Japan to end World War II, then tried to cover it up. "We elect a lot of liars and nincompoops -- everyone takes that for granted," Bemis says. "But this? This is ethical decay. This is beyond belief."

"I've often thought about this," the "Guadalcanal" Marine says to the eager pilot about his own story, "without deciding what it means or where it could lead us ... maybe you'll come to some conclusion that has escaped me." All Connell's characters arrive at this moment of recognition -- this crisis, really -- time and time again: The beginning of the story is understandable, the ending is not. It is Connell's singular gift that he transfers this fictive burden to his readers, and the feeling is invigorating.

Ethan Rutherford is an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota.