Love is the Crooked Thing: Stories

Human love in a variety of quirky manifestations is the subject of these 11 short stories. Abbott, whose first collection, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, won the St. Lawrence Award, dazzles with verbal pyrotechnics but does not necessarily illuminate in his variations on familiar themes: love recollected by grunts in Vietnam; love of father and son; love, or what passes for it, in a Greyhound bus station. Most of the stories, set in the border state of New Mexico, are redolent of downhome insularity, peopled with extravagantly named, raffish characters whose expressive diction often fails to communicate. This is the third book in the publisher's Bright Leaf Short Fiction series. (March)