cover image The Girl from Cardigan: Sixteen Stories

The Girl from Cardigan: Sixteen Stories

Leslie Norris. Gibbs Smith Publishers, $15.95 (164pp) ISBN 978-0-87905-296-6

The 16 stories in this collection by a Welsh-born writer, are of such artistry that one is inclined to reread them immediately to savor the moments they capture. The moments are generally those of youth emerging from the shelter of trust and innocence, ""facing the collapse of his safe world,'' as one schoolboy in the story ``Some Opposites of God'' internalizes the shattering of his illusions by a monstrously cruel schoolmaster. The pawky humor and canniness of country folk emerge in the title story where a contrived marriage cleverly insures that a dying old man's fortune will fall into designated hands. An elegiac tone sounds in ``My Uncle's Story'' when we hear a much-loved wastrel relative speak to an attentive young nephew about his alcohol-wrecked life in terms of ``what he alone had preserved from the waste of time.'' Perhaps most winsome of the group is ``Blackberries,'' where the love between a father and son palpates, coexisting with the poverty-induced tension in the parents' marriage. These artful stories are alive with rural beauty, the flora and fauna of Welsh villages and the Sussex Downs where the people we meet are truly at home. Norris, whose short fiction appears regularly in the New Yorker and Atlantic, is poet-in-residence at Brigham Young University. (April)