cover image The Editor's Choice IV

The Editor's Choice IV

. Bantam Books, $17.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-553-05241-1

For readers without the time to page through the 18 magazines represented here, this anthology is an excellent selection of the year's short stories. Gail Galloway Adams describes a girl's crush on her charming brother-in-law, a bantamweight redneck with the ""Inside Dope.'' In Mary Gordon's ``The Dancing Party,'' a contemporary social roundelay is sketched with the jaunty rhythm and sad undertone of a Gershwin song. A young woman tries to make sense of her threatening, chaotic city in Amy Herrick's ``In the Air, Over Our Heads.'' Tim O'Brien takes us to Vietnam for his elegiac litany of foot soldiers and ``The Things They Carried.'' Also included: works by Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Thomas McGuane, Sue Miller and Elizabeth Tallent. (January)