A collection of short stories selected from national magazines and small literary journals features the work of authors such as Robert Olen Butler, Alice Adams, Rick Bass, Mary Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lynn Sharon Schwartz. This year's short story annual from Houghton has less of a "round up the ususal suspects" feel than previous editions. Though Rick Bass, Jamaica Kincaid, and the ubiquitous Joyce Carol Oates make appearances, it is the debut authors who stand out from the crowd. Junot Diaz, the most highly trumpeted talent of the season and author of the collection Drown (LJ 8/96) makes his first appearance in this collection. Set in the Domenican Republic, his "Ysrael" is the story of two brothers who torment a disfigured boy. In Jason Brown's "Driving the Heart," about a man whose job it is to drive organs for transplant to distant hospitals, the tight prose plays off Brown's wound-up protagonist in convincing fashion. Melanie Rae Thon's heart-rending "X-Mas, Jamaica Plain" features a young prostitute's reminiscence of her friend's suicide. Dan Chaon's "Fitting Ends" is another impressive debut. Stuart Dybek checks in with "Paper Lantern," an intricately layered story of desire that shines as the best. Guest editor John Edgar Wideman (The Cattle Killing, LJ 7/95) does an good job of explaining his selection criteria and goals for the collection in his introduction, as well as bemoaning the pose of objectivity as "a useless fiction." Recommended for all collections.?Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal" Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Though it is possible that none of the stories here will make it into later anthologies of literature or course syllabi, with this collection, readers of fiction have an outstanding cross-section of short fiction currently being published in North America and some sketches of what its more notable practitioners have to say about their writing. This year's stories are wide ranging, from the recollections of a woman's childhood sexual relationship with an adult to the ambitions of a now-communist, now-anticommunist sketch artist in postwar Malaya to the revealing and anguished letters of a father (in nineteenth-century America) to his son, who has abandoned home for an apocalypse-expecting, world-renouncing religious encampment. Wideman's valuable introduction not only seeks to dismantle the iconic status anthologies like this sometimes confer on stories, thus pointing us toward other stories, it also voices a claim for literature's potentially "special, subversive, radically democratic role" in exposing us to the "differences" outside the commercialized mainstream and getting us to address them. Jim O'Laughlin Wideman's smart introduction to this annual series challenges the standard criteria for inclusion, and justifies his other departures from convention--he selects 24 stories, not 20, and he knowingly reprints a selection (``In Roseau'') from Jamaica Kincaid's recently published novel, The Autobiography of My Mother. All of which leads to a remarkably catholic collection, one that seldom sounds a repetitive note, or suggests one typical style for the times. Multicultural themes prevail, with differing consequences: Lan Chang's ``The Eve of the Spirit Festival'' chronicles the uneasy assimilation of an Asian widower and his two daughters in New York; first-timer Akhil Sharma's ``If You Sing Like That for Me'' splendidly evokes a young woman's fears as a wife in Delhi, India; Mary Gordon's ``Intertextuality,'' despite its pretentious title, expertly recalls her Irish immigrant grandmother; and Peter Ho Davies's ``The Silver Screen'' is a Keystone Kops version of communist revolutionaries in postwar Malaysia, a comedy undermined by the radicals' brutal violence. Dan Chaon's troubling ``Fitting Ends'' focuses on the narrator's haunted recollections of his juvenile delinquent brother. William Henry Lewis's powerful ``Shades'' announces a welcome new voice in African-American fiction. The ubiquitous Melanie Rae Thon contributes another of her gritty tales, this of a teenaged prostitute and her best friend, a transvestite prostitute. And Joyce Carol Oates assumes the voice of a girl growing up in strange, seedy circumstances. Anna Keesey (``Bright Water'') convincingly takes on the epistolary style of a 19th-century businessman writing to his son, who leads a millenarian Christian cult. Stylistically, the volume stretches from Stephen Dixon's stream-of-consciousness narrative in ``Sleep'' to William Lychak's delightfully fabulistic tale about an odd woman from the sea. Stories by Robert Olen Butler and Susan Perabe have already appeared in Best Stories from the South, and Junot D¡az's ``Ysrael'' is in his much-noted debut collection, Drown (p. 916). A perfect place to sample the wide range of current fiction. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.