Madonna on Her Back: Stories

This first collection by a winner of the Hopwood Award for Short Fiction consists of eight finely crafted and intensely realized stories about people, often women alone or deprived, who must find outlets not only for their sexuality but also for their very being. In ""Mr. Makes,'' the interior dialogue between a welfare mother and her deformed newborn child speaks with haunting effectiveness to the outside, hostile world. The title story concerns the need for love that motivates two sistersone an art teacher and the other a single parentin their relationships with each other and their men. Though the locales are mainly rural and Southern, one story, ``Where Men Go to Cry,'' has a coda in Africa. Hagy gives voice and texture to the passionate intensity with which often dreamy characters face the daily business of their lives. Drawings by Lisa Wilkinson. (December 20)