Touch & Go

This uneven, sometimes inventive collection of 13 stories by a novelist (Straitjacket & Tie) and CBS television executive employs spare prose that works best in the more sardonic tales. Among the most accomplished entries are ""Death in Belize,"" which concerns a gay tourist's entanglement with an alluring hustler, and ""Hard Bargains,"" in which a woman reporter confronts her own racism as she covers a ghetto shooting in Chicago. Less successful than these polished narratives of sophisticated urbanites under duress are genre-bending stories such as the grisly but affectless ""The Grandmother Golem."" ""The Triumph of the Prague Workers' Council"" is an unsuccessful satire of Marxist academics that toys with conventional (a drawing-room denouement) and unconventional narration (the magic realist elements at the story's end). What is most memorable in the collection is a brief sketch first published in Harper's, ""Buster Keaton Gets Faxed."" This deadpan account of cynical ad executives' thwarted attempts to fully manipulate the image of the inimitable Keaton is acutely satirical and showcases Stein's sharp sense of irony. Author tour. (July) FYI: Stein will be the judge of the publisher's annual short-story contest for unpublished authors under 35. The 20 winning entries will be collected in a volume to be published in the spring of 1998.