Sweet Talk: Stories

``Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.'' This arresting image opens ``Dog Heaven,'' the final story in an accomplished first collection by a young writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker. Vaughn writes mainly in a wry, undistanced first-person voice, creating imaginative language for recognizable young women in varying circumstances and careers. The narrator of ``We're on TV in the Universe'' crashes into a patrol car in winter, looks up at the arriving policeman and sees ``the crazed lights on the top of his car slinging snowfish around his head.'' In ``The Architecture of California'' a young wife comes to understand that her husband has made her best friend pregnant. A comparable unfaithfulness is at the heart of ``Other Women,'' while ``Snow Angel'' tells of a young mother, trapped in the house with her two children during a three-day snowstorm, who manages--just--to keep her sanity and faith with her kids. Most powerful are the stories about Gemma, including ``Kid MacArthur'' and ``Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog'' in which Vaughn's clear-eyed, scalpel-sharp and affectionate observations of a distinctive childhood are delivered in graceful, honest prose. (Feb.)