Small Family with Rooster: Stories

These 20 short stories are by turns comic, tender, sad, raunchy and moving. Rose, whose first novel Flipping for It garnered praise last year, can toss off delectable slices-of-life, like ``Envy the Dead,'' in which a bored-to-tears Air Force wife lures a random phone-caller into an afternoon rendezvous. He is equally adept at subtly analyzing the unspoken tensions that tear couples apart or glue them together. Many of his unpredictable characters are driven to desperation: a Danish mountain climber in South Africa stumbles upon a couple making love and realizes that he misses his wife; a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn turns to a black prostitute in California while searching for his son who has been kidnapped by his estranged wife. Frequently, a powerful image crystallizes the story's emotional impact; in ``About the Sea,'' a neurologist raging helplessly over his son, paralyzed in an accident, holds a defensive college dean responsible and dreams that the man is drowning. Finely crafted and freshly imagined, these insightful tales linger in the mind. (September)