William Trevor’s stories have always been written in stereo. The moments when two strangers meet and evaluate each other are the customary haunts of Mr. Trevor’s omniscient narrators, who tell us everything going on in the minds behind the dialogue. “Angels at the Ritz” captured a couple on the brink of wife-swapping – “D’you think we’ve fallen, Polly?” – when their best friends suddenly became alien and subject to fresh impressions. A very early story, “A Meeting in Middle Age,”w hich depicts a false adultery contrived between a stranger and a would-be divorcee, proved to be a template for Mr. Trevor’s tales of oddly matched souls.

The stories in the author’s 11th collection, “A Bit on the Side” (Viking, 245 pages, $24.95), are as warm and excellent as ever. Naturally they include a few tales of adultery, but this volume’s unique emphasis is on connections never quite made. The hero of the title story ends his affair on the fear that others would call his love “a bit on the side,” but this impression is gleaned from nothing more than eye contact with strangers. His lover reflects: “She knew about the touchiness of love: almost always, it was misplaced.” In one of the strongest stories, “Traditions,” Mr. Trevor draws a love out of thin air, between a schoolboy and the maid he may have never spoken to. Imaginary friends, anonymous personals, and an expensive, rushed transatlantic phone call are all occasions for the silences and small misunderstandings that, as Mr. Trevor sees it, change lives.

Discretion and humility do for Trevor what red-hot feelings do for other writers. But his characters, who are usually almost pitiful in their circumstances, go further toward critiquing one another than a tasteful author ever could himself. At the end of “Sitting With the Dead,” a pious old maid who has just spent hours politely chatting with a new widow suggests, with a measured smallness, that “I’d say, myself, it was the dead we were sitting with.” Mr. Trevor can make such a banality, a flat-faced pun, into a lightning rod.

***

It’s painful to see a writer of Margaret Drabble’s wit succumb, however knowingly, to the lure of orientalism. “The Red Queen” (Harcourt, 334 pages, $24), her 16th novel, is a centaur work in which a normal tale of academic intrigue rides on the more ruminant torso of an 18th-century Korean romance. It has, portentously, both a prologue and an afterword. It is not one of her best.

The first half of Ms. Drabble’s book is a retelling of “The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong,” in which the princess told how she managed while her husband, the crown prince, went mad. This is a tale on a pattern not unfamiliar to connoisseurs of historical epic; Ms. Drabble’s twist is to give Lady Hyegyong a posthumous voice.

As a ghost the princess has become an observer of human affairs, but her chief concern remains her own legacy, the preservation of which falls to Babs Halliwell, a buxom English academic who, on the eve of a conference set in Seoul, receives the princess’s memoirs by anonymous post. Soon enough, we learn, “The princess has entered her, like an alien creature in a science-fiction movie, and she is gestating and growing within her.”

Babs’s story is in turn derailed by an affair that turns out to be the most engaging part of “The Red Queen”; we sense that here Ms. Drabble is on familiar ground and has something to say. She also wants to say something about her historical novel – “This is not an historical novel,” she writes in her prologue – but it is not clear what. About the princess, she writes: “I believe that she was a prescient woman, who lived out of time. In this postmodern age of cultural relativism, that should be an untenable belief.” She wonders if there are not “universal transcultural human characteristics.” But she protests too much – by having as a narrator a semiomniscient, 200-year-old ghost, she has made her choice.

The Nabakovian connection between the two women’s tales leans too heavily on tedious symmetries, such as the tortoiseshell glasses Babs shares with the princess. It is a red dress of the princess’s that, Ms. Drabble confesses, reminded her of her own life and interested her in the tale. But, as with “The Peppered Moth,” a personal interest here seems to have drawn Ms. Drabble away from the reader’s interests.

***

Insanity is the starting point of Peter Stephan Jungk’s very German novel, “Tigor” (Handsel Books, 219 pages, $19). Tigor is a sad mathematician undone by the triumph of chaos theory. Having spent his career searching for a mathematical constant that would describe the crystallization of a snowflake, he is shattered to realize his rivals are right. Fleeing to an academic conference in Trieste, he, like Beckett’s Molloy, sets off crashing through the woods with such terror and energy that he is apprehended by the police. He then begins a recovery – which, alas, brings the novel from its poetically original to an ending awash in quasi-religious allegory.

Mr. Jungk’s newest novel, “The Perfect American” (Handsel Books, 186 pages, $18), was published in translation earlier this year. “Tigor” is an earlier work, from 1991. It evinces Mr. Jungk’s great epistemological range, which includes not only madness but also very lively portraits of sad old men, Armenian terrorists, and idealistic Soviet bureaucrats. It also shows off his humor: Tigor wanly remembers his wilderness home as “the plant room.” But one thing Mr. Jungk almost always gets wrong is Americans.

“The Perfect American” is about Walt Disney. In “Tigor,” Americans are a joke. Tigor, an Italian by birth, teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. When, months after going AWOL, he phones his chief graduate student, a caricature picks up the phone. “I gotta chill, Jesus, Tigerman! … Are you on vacation, or what? I don’t geddit!”

Mr. Jungk finds time to tease other nationalities – a group of Scandinavians laughs “like a tuba nonet.” But his treatment of Americans, doubtless drawn from personal experience, is singular. His Americans inhabit an unrealistic dimension, and it is disconcerting to be portrayed thus by one of the more exciting German voices to emerge in recent years.