Low Rent: A Decade of Prose and Photographs from the Portable Lower East Side

Hollander, who founded The Portable Lower East Side in 1983 and edited it throughout its 10-year history, gathers 40 of the magazine's gritty, memorable short stories, articles and photographs into an interesting, if inconsistent, collection. Hollander baldly asserts the magazine's principle political objectives in his brief introduction: to publish ``work by those who are more than just writers, this is cop killers, geographers, porno stars, musicians, political dissidents, AIDS activists, transvestites, and junkies... `outsider' writing from an insider's perspective.'' But the collection is best when the ``outsiders'' are, in fact, writers. Works by noted authors Grace Paley, Hubert Selby, Alexander Trocchi and David Wojnarowicz, as well as relative newcomers Kelvin Christopher Janes and Adrienne Tien, poignantly explore an unpredictable diversity and range of New York City's margins. Where the collection falters is in pieces of shock, rather than literary, value-the transcript of a phone-sex line, for example, or Veronica Vera's Day at the Peep Show. But for fans of New York's adamantine streets, there's more than enough good material for a satisfying fix. (Oct.)