Outlaws of the Purple Cow and Other Stories

The blue-collar Irish neighborhoods of Pittsburgh during the WWII era come to life in this quirky, uneven collection of stories from Goran, the author of nine novels (Bing Crosby's Last Song) and two previous books of short fiction. Goran has a knack for creating seemingly ordinary characters who behave strangely, and he's at his best when taking a fairly conventional setup and twisting it in odd directions. In ""Jenny and the Episcopalian,"" a young woman looking for love stumbles into a satisfying short-term relationship with a ghost. A heroic man who rescues several people from a bus accident in ""Keeping Count"" is shocked into wondering what his own last thoughts would have been. Feeling that ""an accounting was in order"" for his own life, he mentally lists almost 100 women with whom he had sex and finds himself musing on the confusing loneliness that followed. The characters of ""The Chorus Girl"" are out on a limb when a man falls in love with the surrogate his infertile wife recruits to conceive a child. Some stories have promising openers, but fall flat on the follow-through. ""Guest on Good Friday"" is a quasi-comical tale of fastidious newlyweds who try to get a pushy atheist and his unwieldy rolls of secondhand carpet out of their house. The dialogue is inexplicably stilted, and the moralizing end leaves the piece inchoate. The intriguing premise of ""An Old Man and Three Whores"" stumbles into sentimentality when a widowed senior citizen shocks his family and neighbors by becoming a caretaker and confidant for three ladies of the evening. Nonetheless, Goran's solid writing features earthy dialogue and places emphasis on the nuances of social settings and class contexts, bringing much to offer readers with an interest in working-class, Irish-American Catholic culture. (Sept.)