Music from the Evening of the World

These eight short stories by the author of Country Cousins are dreamily surreal forays into the lives of people who seem rather ordinary, but are actually made of stranger, stronger stuff. A computer systems operator in Colorado, who is unlucky in love, finds satisfaction by sweeping (with a broom) herself to heretofore unknown sexual pinnacles; a man in New York City spends all his time in his apartment, looking at ``dioramas'' of action and inaction that ``materialize without warning and sit glowing in the corners of his room.'' A very short, unruly send-up of contemporary performance art--players, dressed as river carp, confront the passengers of a Manhattan bus--is the most blatantly comedic piece of this collection. One caveat: when read at one sitting, this slim volume of poetic, idiosyncratic slices of life is slightly overwhelming; Brownstein's unique imagination and deadpan descriptions of the bizarre are perhaps best in small doses. This volume is the 16th in Sun & Moon's New American Fiction Series. (Mar.)