Love Stories for the Rest of Us

Exploring love relationships in diverse contexts and permutations, the 25 stories in this adventurous anthology expand the definition of amatory fiction. In Mona Simpson's stunning ``Lawns,'' a kleptomaniacal college student endures a visit from her incestuous father and comes to new terms with both his criminal behavior and her own. Joyce Carol Oates, in ``The Hair,'' tartly describes a middle-aged couple whose marriage gets twisted as they become involved with, and begin to emulate, a snobbish, more successful couple. Culled from Pushcart Prize annuals of the past eight years, the collection, a follow-up to 1987's Love Stories for the Time Being , investigates comic, tragic, unrequited, obsessive, heterosexual and gay love, with divorce, teenage pregnancy, abuse and drug addiction as complicating factors. Andre Dubus's ``Rose,'' for instance, is a powerful and dark tale of a woman's murderous revenge on her physically abusive husband, a construction worker. Ethnicity is a recurrent concern as well. Clarence Major's ``My Mother and Mitch,'' set in 1951 Chicago, tells of a divorced ``colored lady'' who conducts an extended telephone relationship with a white man whose first call to her was a wrong number. And Leonard Michaels's intensely imaginative ``Tell Me Everything'' portrays a Chinese-American painter who embarks on a self-destructive affair with a married and womanizing Sorbonne professor, author of a bestselling novel about 19th-century China. In all, an outstanding collection. (June)