cover image Friendly Fire

Friendly Fire

Kathryn Chetkovich. University of Iowa Press, $20 (132pp) ISBN 978-0-87745-643-8

Although these 11 smart stories explore traditional short-story territory (e.g., the frightened emptiness of a young single woman new to the big city, the wedding of an ex-lover, the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters), they do so with unusual, plainspoken panache and twisty plots. In ""Magic Acts,"" Daphne finds herself pregnant by an unsuitable partner. In need of comfort, she visits her sister, Lila, a lesbian, and her partner, Gwen, and discovers they have decided to become parents by artificial insemination. ""It's a picture of inefficiency somehow--each person coming from a place someone else needs to go,"" reflects Daphne. Sadness, irony and good humor coexist throughout the collection. ""It's my mother, that realist, who always puts temporary happiness in a long-term context,"" reflects a grown daughter in the title story. Chetkovich's sprightly prose allows an unusual display of character and situation in a few pages. Refreshingly robust, Chetkovich's stories have heart, action and resonance. They announce a young writer who knows not only how to probe her characters' lives but also how to make them entertaining. (Sept.) FYI: Friendly Fire won the 1998 John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.