NOSTALGIA for the 1950s is criminal Nostalgia for the ...

Between 1953 and 1955, Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon put out three collections of short stories between them, the saving graces of my teenage years. Their aura of intense isolation and loneliness must have resonated with me, though that wasn't what I was aware of. I loved the style and the horror.

It amazes me that, on rereading them, they're even better than I remembered, true literary gems. They probably could not have been written in any other age, but they're peculiarly universal. Best of all, both Bradbury and Sturgeon were masters of language, writing at their peak.

Short stories today don't get any respect. At one extreme, they live in the rarefied atmosphere of literary magazines read only by those seeking outlets for their own involuted fiction. At the other, they fill genre magazines with maggots and post-apocalyptic landscapes. Bradbury and Sturgeon were writing in the last era when short stories were a popular art form.

Bradbury's October Country is an explosion of language, verbal chutzpah that occasionally boils over into excess but more often makes your linguistic hackles rise in appreciation. These are mood pieces, and the mood is generally one of inescapable isolation?especially for children?laced with supernatural horror. Most revolve around a character whose mental tethers to the world are permanently severed.

"The Jar" is Bradbury at his adjectival extreme, piling on description and skewed monologue until the story itself threatens to rupture?but doesn't. "Jack-in-the-Box" may be the ultimate study of enforced childhood isolation, of a mother who so thoroughly removes her son from the world that he is convinced he lives in a separate universe. "Homecoming," despite comic elements, is a hideously sad tale of the mortal child of an immortal vampire clan. Perhaps the best story in the collection is the uncharacteristically first-person narrative, "The Lake," a reminiscence of childhood loss and near recapture.

These stories are dark, bleak, unforgiving, but marvelous. Bradbury is one of the most fluid writers in English, his pen linked directly to the tumble, roll and sputter of the Word.

For all of that, Sturgeon, in E Pluribus Unicorn and Caviar, is my favorite. He is a near match for Bradbury in the careening use of words, but where Bradbury focuses on isolation as an end-state, Sturgeon deals with loneliness as a way station: "...even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough."

The real selling point of his stories for me is the intensely human, character-driven focus. He also has the rarest of abilities to make the particular universal: When his characters visit a bar or nightclub or a child's bedroom, it could have existed a hundred years ago or tomorrow. You would know it immediately, because you've been there.

Sturgeon covers a surprising range of territory. "Bright Segment" deals with love, possessiveness, gifts, gratitude and the minute detail of physical skill. "Bianca's Hands" filters horror through one man's accepting obsession. "Scars" is nominally a Western, though it's really about a man, a woman and the agony of communication. "The World Well Lost" is sci-fi on the surface (for which Sturgeon was initially best-known), but at heart it's a tale of, again, loneliness and sexual confusion. Probably no writer in "fantasy" has paid so much attention to sex as Sturgeon, who has covered virtually every facet and invented new ones of his own, as in "The Sex Opposite." For the 50s especially, this put him far ahead of his field and of mainstream American literature.

It's good to revisit old friends and find, unlike former college chums, that they have not turned into dull, crabbed shades of William Buckley.