Hey, Brandeis. Do you read on a regular basis?"I would, but I don't have time." "I'm a science major-what do you think?" "Yeah, right." "By the time I'm finished reading for class, there's no way I'm going to look at anything else."

Excuses, excuses, harried Brandesians. While I'm sure we'd all tackle Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or the various magnum opera of the notoriously long-winded Leo Tolstoy if we only had the time, literature has provided us with a natural rejoinder to the dilemma of "not having enough time to read."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the short story. There is a bounty of these light works available, and I know of several volumes that even the most frazzled Brandesian should not ignore.

The Pacific: Mark Helprin's Memoir from Antproof Case, while stunning, is weighty and time-consuming. The Pacific is an engaging collection of short stories that are smart without being too heavy. Take, for example, the very first story, "Il Coloro Retrovato," a sarcastic eye-roll that turns into an eyes-closed contemplation of youth and freshness and art, all wreathed in deadpan wit.

And then there's the story of a weedy young Chasidic Jew who has been charged by God to go to New York and spread his wisdom by saving the Yankees from humiliation. That's all it took to sell me The Pacific.

A Child Again: After I read Robert Coover's wacky, mind-boggling novel The Public Burning, I was an instant addict. This book of short stories has a deceptively simple, even trite concept: to rework children's tales into dark, leering fables of immorality and illusion and resignation. I say deceptive because Coover has worked riddles or cryptograms into many of the tales, and I wouldn't put it past the devilish author to have made many of his puzzles unanswerable. Or maybe that impression simply stems from the fact that I've only solved one of the riddles.

In any case, A Child Again is dark with a smattering of fun and even an example of hypertext, the postmodernist's version of a pick-your-own adventure tale. Brandeis even offers it in the library, or it will once I return it.

Speaking of riddles, in working my way through some of Vladimir Nabokov's short stories, I discovered "The Vane Sisters." The story contains a self-referential secret that, once revealed to me, was so chilling I swear I felt my core body temperature drop. I'm not going to champion any particular short story collection, because Nabokov offers a copious number of short stories that condense his novelistic genius into, at most, a couple dozen pages. Students without the time to tackle Pale Fire or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight will appreciate his efforts.

Cosmicomics: Oh, Italo Calvino. Who doesn't love your fantastical sensibilities? These short stories narrated by recurring Calvino creation Qwfwq take stodgy scientific concepts and transform them into poignant, gemlike reminisces about the time when the universe was young. Primordial child-things play marbles with particles in "Games Without End," and "The Spiral" has a mollusk teach us about life and love. The whole volume is unremittingly beautiful, leading to my internal debate on whether, in this case, brevity was a benefit or a curse. I finished Cosmicomics all too soon and went on to other short works by Calvino like Under the Jaguar Sun and the similarly gorgeous Invisible Cities. It's a magical realist wonderland.

However, the history of short fiction does, in fact, begin before the 20th century, and for some earlier offerings, I looked to Guy de Maupassant's contes, popularized in the form of "The Necklace." "Boule de Suif," or "Ball of Fat," is a fresh example of Maupassant fiction that is endlessly entertaining. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories are historical and finely wrought, and Chaucer and Boccaccio's omnipresent Canterbury Tales and Decameron are historical and delightfully bawdy.

Authors from Voltaire to Borges have given us short stories that defy even the busiest student to avoid reading. The beauty of the short story anthology is the ability to pick it up, read a segment and lay it down until essays and problem sets permit another reading session.