Last fall, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the group that hands out the Nobel Prize in Literature, disparaged American letters, saying our fiction was “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends” in our own “mass culture” (in short, too American) to matter much to the wider world. But it’s the very Americanness of our literature — the hybrid nature of our national makeup, the variety and breadth of our landscape, our mania for self-invention and reinvention — that captured the international imagination at a time when most readers could never visit the country they dreamed about. It still does today.

Americanness needs no apology; it’s the strength of our letters. And few of our contemporary writers exemplify its adaptive vitality better than Louise Erdrich, herself descended from the first Americans (her mother was part Chippewa, part French, and her grandmother was a tribal chairwoman) and from German immigrants. The author of some two dozen books for adults and children, Erdrich is also a wondrous short story writer. In “The Red Convertible,” she gathers 36 stories, 26 previously published, together creating a keepsake of the American experience. Like the painted drum in her story of that name, this collection can be considered “a living thing,” an emblem of the universe — “exquisitely sensitive for so powerful an instrument.”

If a short story is to succeed, it must suggest what a work of greater heft would make explicit. In Erdrich’s story “Scales,” which appeared in The North American Review and “The Best American Short Stories 1983” and was later folded into the novel “Love Medicine,” she describes the fierce bond between Dot Adare, a sturdy, irascible woman who weighs trucks for the North Dakota Highway Department, and her rascally husband, Gerry Nanapush. In the weigh shack, the pregnant Dot knits clothes for her baby, “pulling each stitch so tightly that the little garments she finished stood up by themselves like miniature suits of mail.” Just in time for the birth, Gerry springs himself from jail, riding to the hospital on a “huge and ancient, rust-pocked” motorcycle. A few weeks later, when she’s back in the weigh shack and Gerry’s back in jail, Dot impulsively weighs the child on the truck scale. “He was so dense with life, such a powerful distillation of Dot and Gerry, it seemed he might weigh about as much as any load,” Erdrich writes. “But that was only a thought, of course. For as it turned out, he was too light and did not register at all.” In the scales, perhaps he didn’t; but on the page his weight is solid, both with past accumulation and latent future.

In the preface to this collection, Erdrich explains that every time she finishes writing a short story, she considers it done, complete. “There is no more,” she thinks. And yet, she adds, “the stories are rarely finished with me. They gather force and weight and complexity. Set whirling, they exert some centrifugal influence.” Together, they move.

Readers of Erdrich may think of her as a chronicler of Native American ways, and this she certainly is, but her mine taps other veins as well. Many sorts of Americans appear among her characters: a reclusive New Hampshire sculptor; a small-minded German sister-in-law; a trapeze artist who saves her daughter from a burning house; a play-acting bank robber; a Eurasian doctor who lures a college girl by promising to cook her an omelet. Some readers may think of Erdrich as a teller of folk tales and parables, which she also is, although much of her writing lies outside that category. Still others may regard her as a master tuner of the taut emotions that keen between parent and child, man and woman, brother and sister, man and beast, and she is that as well. She can also be very, very funny.

In one of her new stories, “The Gravitron,” an incident occurs that made me laugh aloud, on and off, for 20 minutes. (I won’t deprive you of the surprise of it.) In another new offering, “Anna,” a secret subtext exhilarates a curiously unsensationalized ménage-à-trois. Elsewhere, stories are lightened by the humor of day-to-day scrapes and dodges. In “Shamengwa,” a no-good teenager who has stolen an old man’s violin ends up in a Fargo shopping mall, playing frenzied air-fiddle to earn change from passersby. In “The Bingo Van,” an insolent gas station clerk offers a bag of Day-Glo party balloons to a customer who wants to buy condoms. Even a wrenching story like “The Butcher’s Wife” has room for scenes of whimsy — when a grown man, horsing around with his friends, performs an absurd feat of strength, lifting an obese friend off a table by the belt using only his teeth. But he doesn’t do it for laughs; he does it to distract his sick wife, who watches from an upstairs window.

With great delicacy, Erdrich handles the emotions of indelicate people, as they’re tripped up by the uneven terrain of their lives. Fittingly, she finds a metaphor for the human condition in a Northeastern forest: “In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what’s beneath.”

Reading almost 500 pages of short stories can tax your patience or set your mind wandering, but not with this writer. Erdrich’s characters and situations reappear from one story to another, linking generation to generation, past to present, hyphenated-American to hyphenated-American in a multitude of shifting moods.

Can these moods, these voices, spark feelings of recognition in non-Americans? If not, that may be less the fault of the author than a symptom of changes both beyond and within our country’s borders. Consider the barrage of movies and news, Internet and travel options — images and innovations that simultaneously satisfy and dull one’s curiosity, replacing reflection and reverie with quick sensation. If contemporary audiences prefer to watch “The Last of the Mohicans” rather than to read it, is Fenimore Cooper diminished? If foreign readers find no affinity with Updike, Roth or Oates, does that mean our men and women of letters have lost their art? And, by the same token, if American readers would rather watch cable television to get their Tolstoy and Austen, and choose to skip “The Magic Mountain,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” Elfriede Jelinek and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, is Europe to blame? Or is the capacity for the quiet use of leisure, something essential to reading, on the wane? Isolation and insularity can afflict any land. One of the best cures is to read the finest literature from as many places as possible. Louise Erdrich might call it “life medicine.”

THE RED CONVERTIBLE
Selected and New Stories 1978-2008
By Louise Erdrich
496 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.