Of Memory and Desire: Stories

The unrelenting landscape of the American Southwest is backdrop for the daily struggles of many of the restless people attempting to shape twisting lives in these 11 stories. Sharing a gritty verisimilitude are such characters as the widowed grandmother in ``Black Hole,'' who shocks with her determination to bear to term the child conceived in a chance encounter; the woman whose dreams die in her husband's traveling circus as a sandstorm whirls (``Carnival for the Gods''); the aging Jewish couple of ``Land of Promise'' whom death visits in an alien territory. In the title story, perhaps the most layered and nuanced, a simple, isolated farmer, harassed by the tax collector, dies and his child helper disappears. Although they are seen no more, their memory remains haunting. Swan claims the reader's attention in these vigorous renderings of human experience. (Sept.)