American Made: New Fiction from the Fiction Collective

Whether in the form of allegory, fable, sales pitch or police report, among others, these 19 stories are marked by a feeling of despair and pointlessness. Even the best of the lot, Russell Banks's ""The Fish,'' contains this feeling. Yet this allegory of how man's greed and fear destroys that which he desires is so simply and charmingly written that the obviousness of the symbolism is unimportant. Not so ``The Seersucker Suit'' by Marianne Hauser (the man in the story is literally a dog), which while attempting to reveal truths about the relationships between men and women, only succeeds in irritating. Similarly, in Ursule Molinaro's ``The Apocalyptic Flirtation'' the male half of the couple is not an animal, but a machine. The stories in which an experimental writing style is emphasized, such as ``March 11'' by George Chambers, neither reveal truths nor are formally inventive. (August)