Four Decades: New and Selected Stories

Weaver (Men Who Would Be Good; The Way We Know in Dreams) has earned himself a respectable niche in the field of finely wrought literary fiction, and his stories rarely miss their mark. This collection of 11 entries ranges widely: tales like ""Whiskey, Whiskey, Gin, Gin, Gin"" and ""Return of the Boyceville Flash"" gaze with bittersweet sympathy at the destructive and self-deluding power of alcohol; ""Haskell Hooked on the Northern Cheyenne,"" ""The Good Man of Stillwater, Oklahoma"" and ""Madness"" explore the subtle ironies of dementia. ""Wouldn't I"" is an eerie tale of army life gone awry; and ""The Parts of Speech"" is one of those extraordinarily difficult (and in this case, surprisingly successful) postmodern attempts to mix autobiography with fiction about the art of writing fiction. Weaver's command of descriptive language and dialogue is adroit, his humor sharp and canny, his phrasings magically fine-tuned. On the football field, at an army base or in a local bar, characters achieve an easy realism within their settings, courtesy of the grace and terminological exactness of their creator's prose. (June)