Beatle Dreams and Other Stories

This awkward collection includes short stories, studies, reflections and character sketches. Much of it is highly experimental. In ``She Lived in a Story,'' a writer named Segovia, a thinly veiled stand-in for the Mexican Samperio, has the idea for a story about a young woman who realizes she's just a character in a narrative. When this woman starts writing in her journal about the feeling, she is soon describing Segovia's actions as he comes to the same realization she has reached. A series of six very short tales is based on the conceit that women's personalities are determined by the color of the shoes they wear. Two other selections describe two archetypes of office life. Samperio's writing is lively and fun and the translation is lucid, but some of the conceits are precious, and often the execution is too skimpy (26 of the 37 stories take up five pages or fewer) to carry the stentorian style. (Sept.)