Short-story collections are notoriously tough sells in the publishing world -- the unwanted stepsister to the glamorous and more-marketable novel. So it is often left to small, nonprofit publishers to take a chance and spread these stories out before us. That chance is more than justified by "Night Train," Lise Erdrich's first collection of short stories, published by Coffee House Press of Minneapolis.

Erdrich lives in Wahpeton, N.D., where she grew up, and is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe; she is sister to Minneapolis-based writers Louise Erdrich and Heid Erdrich.

Clearly there was some good story-making juju going on in the Erdrich household, because "Night Train" thrums with so much imagination and humor that you can almost forget the low notes of despair. Her stories are simple and complex, poignant and hilarious, biting and tender. And, at times, confusing. I finished the book and started it over again. Because her stories are so tiny -- prose poems, some would say, with many of them running no more than a page and a half -- the first read doesn't give you enough. It's like catching a glimpse through a barely cracked door into a room blazing with light and color. You may not want to enter, but you want a longer look.

Unlike some short-story collections, in which familiar characters reappear until you're following a loosely woven novel, "Night Train" carries the voices of men and women of all ages, of derelicts and drunks and the nurses who treat them, of lonely brides and angry husbands, of straight shooters and bawdy losers. It is Erdrich's intense sense of place, the North Dakota prairie and the desolate what-the-hell life of Indian Country, that keeps these characters firmly bound in the same world.

Erdrich claims that her writing is fueled by strong black coffee "to the edge of cardiac arrest," and several of her stories, composed of one or two hilarious run-on sentences, seem to back her claim. "ERRR," for instance, is told in the jangled speech of a hyped-up ER nurse, ordering food after tending to two highly drug-addled patients. "Yah I ordered the Number 4 with the wild rice and pink cupcake and Number 7 with two frybreads, don't get off work for another eight hours," she says, before launching into the tale of her previous shift with ho-hum rapid-fire humor.

But many of Erdrich's stories are not so caffeine-driven. In "Autumn," a young girl drifts slowly through a dreamlike account of old families and old customs and a chilling silent rape in an upstairs bedroom. In "Beehive," a young bride traveling with her new husband suddenly feels cold when he doesn't get her simple joke. "It was not the first time she had noticed something missing in his mind."

In a sly, sweet spin of a creation myth, "Corn Is Number One," corn and other vegetables vie for space before learning to live together. Corn complains about Bean's entwining tendrils: " 'Can't you stand on your own!' cried the Corn. 'No,' said the Bean, 'This is what I do.' ... Corn was not a hugger, but that was the situation."

Erdrich creates some hilariously scummy men, like the boyfriend in "Fennel Toothpaste," who goes on an enraged meat-eating bender when his girlfriend becomes a vegetarian and leaves him. But she also creates some regular -- OK, oversized -- good guys. In "XXXL," a woman wary of love after a brutally violent marriage goes grocery shopping with her new "brave." "He's more than just big, he's ... XXXL." As he fills the cart with industrial-sized cans of pinto beans, corn niblets, stewed tomatoes, "like a foundation to the household we were now going to share," she recalls the mean stinginess of her ex-husband and basks in the generous love of this huge man.

"Finally we head up to the checkout and approach it like a small essential ceremony, so happy. We stand reverently together through the total and then we bag it up and box it up and we put it in our cart and then the ceremony is over and we float blissfully up to the sensitive red carpet and the doors fly wide open for us, like magic."

"Night Train" is full of such moments that lift you, smack you, inform you and make you laugh. Read it twice, and the doors will fly wide open for you, like magic.

Susan Lenfestey, of Minneapolis, is a frequent contributor to the Star Tribune's Opinion Exchange pages.