The Best of the West 3: New Short Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri

These 16 stories set in the American West constitute a vivid collection, with each displaying a distinctive voice. In ``My Sister and Her Visit West,'' Leslie Poling-Kempes examines the links across the vast physical distance separating twin sisters. Chris Spain's droll, truck-driving narrator ricochets in mood from good humor to the doldrums to pure tension as he tries to survive another day in ``Let the Babies Keep Their Hearts.'' In Laura Hendrie's ``What Lasts,'' a woman whose memory is eroding still has two reliable landmarks in the world: her mailbox perched on a six-foot pole and her husband's patient, continuing love. Christopher Tilghman's ``Hole in the Day'' describes a young mother's flight from the responsibilities that overwhelm her; she returns willingly when her husband tracks her down, having realized that ``whether she likes it or not Grant and her babies are everything for her, that she may want something more but needs nothing else.'' The Western settings (ranging from farmland to desert to the Dakotas) are integral to these stories, but the collection goes beyond the regional in its interest and appeal. The Thomases edited the two previous volumes in the series . (Aug.)