Winters Tales, New Series 7

Diverse geographical and emotional terrains are explored in this latest rewarding and provocative installment of the well-known annual anthology of stories. In Patrick McGrath's ``The Other Psychiatrist,'' a devasting satire on the psychoanalytic profession, a suicidal patient's precarious condition takes a back seat to the acrimonious rivalry between two shrinks at an upstate New York mental home. Balraj Khanna's ``The Last Card Game'' features an unhappily married Punjabi transplanted to London who uses the promises of his shrewish, continental wife's sexual favors as a bargaining chip in a wild card game. Interior monologue enlivens Laura Kalpakian's witty portrayal of an American arts administrator in Italy, a specialist in Renaissance angels whose complex love life is anything but heavenly (``Change at Empoli''). Marriage is on the rocks in Helen Harris's ``The Mirage,'' about a hilariously mismatched childless couple, and in Tony Peake's ``Necessary Appendages,'' in which a newlywed wife tries to accommodate her husband's homosexual yearnings. Two or three of the 12 stories misfire, but these are more than compensated for by the successes here. (Jan.)