E.L. Doctorow, in short form, is a pleasure

Although best known as one of the greatest 20th-century American novelists, E. L. Doctorow (Billy Bathgate, Ragtime) also published three collections of short fiction. Prior to his death in 2015, at age 84, he made arrangements to release one last volume posthumously. This is it.

While his publisher states that the author himself “selected, revised and placed in order” the 15 stories in Doctorow: Collected Stories (Random House, 321 pp., *** out of four stars), why Doctorow chose to revisit these short stories, all published previously, some multiple times, is puzzling.

Eleven appeared in his 2011 collection All the Time in the World. Five of those, and the remaining four, had been published in his earlier Lives of the Poets and Sweet Land Stories collections.

The key, however, is that these tales — sketches, really, wide-ranging in time, place and circumstances — are penned by a modern master, albeit one whose sweet spot was the fully rendered novel. That fact undoubtedly filters the reading of this book.

With almost each story, it’s hard not to imagine what richer characterizations and plots might’ve been. In a couple cases, no imagining is necessary. The Water Works, a Kafkaesque story set in New York in 1871 in which a child drowns in reservoir machinery, evolved into the author’s novel The Waterworks. And Doctorow adapted the story Heist, about an Episcopal priest coping with a crisis of faith and a stolen altar cross, into the novel City of God.

The first of the book’s stories, Willi, sets the tone with its macabre Oedipal tale set in Eastern Europe just before World War I, depicting a farm boy’s discovery of his mother’s infidelity resulting in a gruesome ending. In Walter John Harmon, readers descend into a first-person account of a creepy religious cult. And, in A House on the Plains, a half-witted teenager narrates a tale about his murderous mother’s con-artistry.

While no overlying theme ties these stories together, a darkness runs through them. Alienation, self-delusion and moral ambiguity do, too, sometimes humorously and through oddly sympathetic characters. In the masterpiece Baby Wilson, the narrator’s insane girlfriend has stolen a newborn from a maternity ward. The empathy-stirring Jolene: A Life follows a teenage girl’s escape from her dismal home life into a brutal, crazy, weirdly uplifting search for identity.

It’s ironic that Doctorow chose to include All the Time in the World as the book’s final story, since that’s exactly what he didn’t have. His death makes reading between its fragmented sci-fi story’s lines more interesting, however.

What makes Doctorow’s historical novels brilliant is their engaging prose, smart writerly style, unconventional narratives and inventive and entertaining plots. Same for these dog-eared, pre-owned stories.

But wouldn’t a complete Doctorow collection have made more sense? Or imagine a book of his never-before-published stories. But for readers new to Doctorow, or longtime fans needing a visitation, this is literary recycling at its best.