New Growth: Contemporary Short Stories by Texas Writers

Fiction written over the past five years, some not previously published, is gathered here by critic and editor Grant ( Letters of Roy Bedichek ). Clay Reynolds's ``A Better Class of People,'' an account of a near-brawl in a bar, is couched in good-old-boy dialect, but the narrator's journey toward maturity strikes a universal note. A woman overwhelmed by her encounter with the West eventually flees to England in Carolyn Osborn's ``Cowboy Movie.'' ``The Spanish Lesson,'' by Edward Swift, mingles a writer's recollection of his aunt, who gingerly fed every vagrant at her door in case they were angels sent to test her charity, with his wife's memories of her Mexican grandmother, a medicine woman. ``Life Forms,'' by Catherine Agrella, is set in Houston's NASA space center, that ultimate symbol of modern Texas, which emerges in this collection as a place of variety, disjunction and vitality, although many of its inhabitants' lives are filled with confusion and despair. The writing is literate and the pace lively, but none of the stories stakes out new ground or reaches very far. (Nov.)