Art should transcend reality.

Ethan Canin has written five books -- of which I have read four -- and his writing compels because it's able to convey the extraordinary in the ordinary.

The Palace Thief, published in 1994, is a collection of four stories threaded together with emotionally deep characters whose small lives convey insight.

Canin, who was in his mid-twenties when he published his first collection of stories in 1988, writes with the bravura and wisdom of an author many years his senior. The delicate truths he exposes resonate with an air of ethereality.

Through targeted, concise, writing, The Palace Thief packs words with meaning. The collection is book-ended by two glowing stories.

The first, "Accountant," retells the carefully planned life of Abba Roth and how it diverges from that of his childhood friend, Eugene Peters. Canin eloquently articulates their separate paths, one heading for college and another to work in an auto-parts dealership.

"It became apparent that we had diverged because he was interested in the present and I was interested in the future," Roth's character recounts.

But, as Roth methodically plods his course through the accounting firm, Peters takes risks and ascends the business world.

After losing contact with one another, years later Roth receives an invitation to join his former friend at a baseball fantasy camp. While business implications underlie the week's events, the childhood rivalry the men had is rekindled.

Roth's envy of his former friend, his subordinate position and his gratefulness for opportunity seep through the ensuing lines and line drives. Roth watches former Giants' player Willie Mays eat waffles and talk about the 49ers with awe and awkwardness. His tiny life doesn't register on the radar of the living legend, doing every day things.

"Say, I bet they sock you at tax time," Roth slips to Mays, in an embarrassing moment. Meanwhile Peters hobnobs with the former great with ease and confidence.

Playing ball reinvigorates Roth, and, after the week he is -- arguably -- the most valuable player.

But the award of a pair of stirrups worn by Mays in his last season in the major league instead goes to his friend, Peters. And it is in response to this slight that, in a split second, Roth sets aside his planning and pockets one of the socks.

In so doing he dissolves his chances of securing what would be the largest account he would procure during his long tenure at the firm.

The smallness of the limp sock laying over his business proposal is an image that resonates how a whim had felled his firm foundation in life.

The final story in the collection, sharing the name of the book, The Palace Thief, evokes a similar wistfulness as the first story.

In the story, which was later adapted into the movie The Emperor's Club, Mr. Hundert's career as a history teacher at an elite prep school spans five decades, where he teaches many future leaders of the country.

Hundert puts together a competition that instills such leadership ideals, allowing three academic class leaders to vie for superior scholarship and be crowned "Mr. Julius Caesar."

He teaches, "It is critical for any man of import to understand his own insignificance before the sands of time, and this is what my classroom always showed my boys."

Sedgewick Bell, the son of a senator, is wrongly admitted entrance into the event and he proceeds to cheat to the brink of victory.

Years later, as the school is on uneasy footing, Hundert receives a response to a pledge drive from Bell, who has risen to the top of a steel company. Bell proposes a rematch of the competition at his company's private island, which Hundert accepts.

The events of the past go full circle, and in the end Bell falls second.

But, again, he gets the best of the situation, using the competition as a fund-raiser and announcing his upcoming bid for a seat in the Senate in order to follow in his father's footsteps.

The lessons of the past are relived for the history teacher, as he fails in his aim to shape the moral character of Bell -- something he had appealed to Sen. Bell more than four decades earlier.

"I'm sorry, young man," he [Senator Bell] says slowly, "but you will not mold him. I will mold him. You will merely teach him."

Despite the lessons of The Palace Thief, Canin is not going to be in your classroom.

His stories don't bleed through the page with sap, cliché or plasma. His skill is honed and the truths he exposes both ground and elevate reality.