THE GARDEN STATE <i> by Gary Krist (Vintage: $7.95) </i>

Fresh, wryly funny stories of life in the less fashionable stretches of the Eastern Seaboard. A high school student who gets a job writing eulogies for strangers becomes so enamored of his own prose, he begins recreating people’s lives in his own image in “How I Learned to Raise the Dead of Bergen County.” In “The Tribes of Northern New Jersey,” another student finds himself caught in between his divorced parents, whose behavior has become as ritualized as native warfare in New Guinea. Absurd yet frequently poignant, “The Garden State” is an impressive debut by a talented writer.