Oguz Atay stretched the possibilities of fiction and critiqued his changing nation with playful, surreal stories.

Kafka warned us against the treachery of language, its many flavors of betrayal. In a 1914 letter, he cautioned his sister Ottla not to accept anything he wrote or said at face value: ''I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.''

But some writers embrace these fault lines, and their finest works often reflect on the deficiencies of their own medium. Neither aspiring to perfect coherence nor succumbing to the deepest darkness of incomprehensibility, WAITING FOR THE FEAR (NYRB Classics, 208 pp., paperback, $16.95) is an astonishing, deeply wry example, a collection of eight short stories by one of the most influential and inventive Turkish writers of the 20th century, Oguz Atay.

These linguistically playful, slightly surreal stories, written in the 1970s, center on the down-and-out misfits and oddballs who struggle to connect with the rest of society. Whether through an advice columnist ridiculed for his fastidiousness or a seemingly scatterbrained woman who discovers the decomposing body of her ex-husband, Atay (1934-77) alerts us to what he called the ''fear of living,'' a hypervigilant anxiety about the outside world.

Language and its shortcomings are key preoccupations. In the lengthy title story, a nervous young man's life unravels when he receives an ominous letter from a cult in words he can neither identify nor understand. A professor of ancient languages helps decipher the note: ''You are henceforth absolutely forbidden to leave your house,'' it reads. The young man readily obliges and his life soon becomes a series of abortive chores, hobbies and bouts of self-destructive claustrophobia. He halfheartedly picks up Latin and English grammar books, reads up...