I feel a little cheated no one ever told me this stuff was out there. I’d heard the name Kenneth Burke in connection with his career as a literary critic, but I had no idea there was a fictional oeuvre attached to that name—let alone a body of work this masterful and broad. Burke’s telegraphic bio might be full of illustrious fellowships and titles like The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology, but in this book, even the author’s bio is avant-garde. In 1918, Burke dropped out of college; in 1924, he published his first collection of stories; in 1925, he published his translation of Death in Venice; in 1931, his first volume of criticism; in 1932, his first novel; in 1933, he left his wife for her sister and became the music critic for the Nation.

This book—collecting in one place the previously published volumes Towards a Better Life (a short novel) and The White Oxen (stories), as well as a handful of prose poems and previously uncollected short fiction—is little short of astounding. As one might expect from a scholar of rhetoric, Burke’s prose is impeccable and, for the most part, crystal clear, but his imagination is that of a modern Blake. The collision of hyperarticulacy and ecstasy produces a voice so original as to seem utterly new.

His mastery of the English language allows him to compose pieces that succeed as philosophy, domestic drama, myth, hallucination, or pure music—usually succeeding at several at once, sometimes becoming just one or two, and sometimes, thrillingly, swerving between all of them in baffling succession. “Let us build a great hippopotamus,” begins the coda to one otherwise realistic story—apropos nothing whatsoever—“to the glorification of our century.”

Towards a Better Life is the longest piece in this collection, a sort of one-sided epistolary novel with a flamboyantly solipsistic narrator. Ostensibly, the story is about the narrator’s relationship with the ex-friend to whom the epistles are addressed, but the discourse seldom escapes the confines of his own mind; instead of relying upon external images or events to explain his emotional state, the narrator writes in carefully balanced aphorism and analysis, something like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable from the point of view of Jane Austen.

When the narrator finally renders a discrete image, it radiates pathos and significance. At the end of a...