E-Mail This Article to a Friend Get shorty Summer’s the time for fast reads; new short-story collections are just the thing BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

Summer is a season of short attention spans. From June to September, a host of warm-weather distractions vie for our time and minds. Provincetown, the Vineyard, and Maine all beckon. Manny and Varitek command our attention. Beaches and barbecues can’t be ignored. We rush to relax in the sun. And while winter is a time to snuggle up in turtlenecks and lose ourselves in Anna Karenina or Moby-Dick, summer is for shorter stuff, for literary jaunts we can take in a single sitting. But that doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice substance. Short-attention-span season doesn’t necessitate fluff.

During the warm months, it’s hard to resist the inclination to slip a magazine into the bag with the suntan lotion and bug spray — a Mademoiselle or a Maxim — and snack on photos of doe-eyed starlets or learn the top 10 ways to please your partner. Or worse still, the literary equivalent of cheese puffs: the cadre of books termed "beach reads." But what you read in the summer doesn’t have to be breezy, mindless, and light. Below you’ll find a selection of new short-story collections, quick to read, but still satisfying.

For a while, saying you were a David Foster Wallace fan labeled you as of-the-moment. Everyone seems to like Wallace — it’s hard not to — and because of that, there’s been a lit-snob backlash against him, a whole I’m-too-cool-for-DFW camp. Snobs be damned: Wallace’s writing stuns and thrills. It makes you ache. Not because his stories are necessarily sad — although they can be — but because the worlds and lives he creates, in his novel Infinite Jest and prior short-story collections Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair, among other works, are so fully realized, so bizarre and immediate. And on June 8, the postmodern doyen and famed footnoter releases Oblivion: Stories (Random House; $25.95), his first book of fiction in five years.

The stories — some of which have been published previously, although not always under Wallace’s name — include the satirical "The Surfing Channel," about a magazine writer profiling an artist whose medium is his own shit. An advertising company pumps out a campaign to increase the public’s appetite for a food product packed with cholesterol in "Mr. Squishy." And in the title story, a husband’s snoring and his wife’s objections become a catalyst for self-examination. Regardless how weird, seemingly surreal, or outlandish they are, Wallace’s tales make you pound your palm to your forehead in awe as you say to yourself: this is true, this is life. (Wallace reads from Oblivion on June 25, at 7 p.m., at the First Parish Church, in Cambridge. Call 617-354-5201.)

The stories in Bret Anthony Johnston’s debut collection, Corpus Christi (Random House; $23.95), due out June 15, center in and around the hurricane hub of Corpus Christi, Texas. A native Texan, former professional skateboarder, and graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Johnston writes prose that is lurid, clean, and marked by precise images. His stories possess something tempestuous; they evoke that pre-storm air pressure, when the air gets thick and the sky turns a dark and sickly yellow. An undercurrent of disruption and upheaval pervades.

In "Waterwalkers," a hurricane reunites a man and a woman divided by tragedy and a shared past. Johnston mixes hardware details — the objects and acts that make the situations so physically vivid — with astonishing revelations and emotional insight. Of boarding up windows, he writes, "When he had offered Nora his plywood — it lay in his truck bed, under the camper — she had accepted it by saying, ‘So here we go again.’" And later, of the characters drifting apart: "A blankness set in, as if not reporting his actions to Nora, not even planning to report them, stripped them of any significance." There’s foreboding (and sometimes violence) in the still moments before the storm and the quiet moments after it. Other stories involve an accident on the highway and the intersecting lives of strangers; a son witnessing his father’s incendiary act and being forced to lie about it; and a dying mother imagining her son’s life without her. Johnston’s characters inhabit a loneliness that’s uniquely American, a scarred embitterment.