One is a Wanderer: Selected Stories

Drawn from earlier collections covering the past three decades, these 21 stories range across a variety of locales, social echelons and literary styles. In ""Voices,'' a child aspiring to penetrate the ``secret world'' of adults discovers she can magically hear through walls. But the voices she hearsvoices of rancor, avarice, disgustare best kept from children, and to her they prove fatal. One of several tales about Japan, ``A Corner of the Foreign Field,'' concerns a Japanese Anglophile who, after making his first British friend, relinquishes his lifelong dream. The selection ends with ``His Everlasting Mansion,'' a bitter parable of rags to riches to rags to the possibility of riches again, which the narrator``Call me Misanthropos''is now too bilious to desire. King's characters often become aware that they have hoped for the wrong thing: ironically, striving is more rewarding than success. Some readers may find these stories overly tight, with no evocative loose ends. Still, the author's esteemed reputation in Britain is well-deserved. The collection is uniformly lucid, intelligent and engaging. Foreign rights: Hutchinson, U.K. February 4