Elizabeth Ellen's new collection Fast Machine is billed in some of its promotional materials as an "anthology." And even though it's written by just one woman, that label makes sense. It's a dense little brick of a book whose insides have been chopped up into dozens of short stories, many no longer than a paragraph. The stories all feel taut and inwardly focused. The women in these stories—and they are, with very few notable exceptions, women—range in age from childhood through middle age. Some of them are from relatively comfortable backgrounds (at least, comfortable enough to be sent to boarding school) and others are addicts who live in filthy squats.

Though there's no way Machine could be read as the story of one woman, the whole thing builds into something like a catalog of a single fractured psyche, or a life story shoved into a kaleidoscope and shot through with a million multicolored rays of light. The characters all share the same vocabulary of experiences from the end of the 20th century (Purple Rain, Johnny Carson, Natural Born Killers, Judy Blume) and the stories are all more or less told in variations on Ellen's between-the-eyes prose. Here's one woman trying to keep her man by shooting nude photos of herself: "Knees in varying degrees of apartness. I took thirty-three pictures, deleted twenty-nine." Here's a woman trying to lose her man:

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