The Guns in the Closet

Hiding behind an explosive title is a sagacious but uneven collection of stories ranging from the urbane to the mundane. The stories are all set along the east coast of the U.S., many in the communities of retired cigar-makers in Yglesias's home town of Tampa, Fla. They are peopled with hispanos, whites and blacks who come with subtly complicated lives and wonderfully outrageous families. In this world, a smile is a mask that can conceal something quite unexpected. Some stories are stronger than others, placid surfaces sometimes magnifying the humor, or the terror beneath. Of particular note are ""In the Bronx,"" in which an aspiring middle-class single mother attempts to separate from her community, and ""The Girls on the Block,"" in which a grandmother forms a tender alliance with a young black prostitute to the alarm of her nosy neighbors. The collection ends with a tedious repressed dream of a story in which the author becomes a ""literary gangster"" of sorts at a bizarre garden party in New England. Representing 20 years of work, it sometimes seems as if these stories were written by two very different men. Yglesias, (Break-In) is a journalist as well as a fiction writer, and these stories have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines. (Oct.)