What They Tell You to Forget

Winner of Pushcart's annual Editors' Book Award, this debut collection of seven beautifully written stories unflinchingly embraces reality in all its contradictions, failures, confusions, ragged edges. ``A Buffalo, New York Story'' splices Life magazine snippets and memories of Hollywood movies to evoke a 13-year-old's adolescence as molded by his workaholic storeowner father and stern grandfather in the Cold War era of Sputnik and fallout shelters. Pfeil's adventurous technique also enlivens ``Dirty Pieces,'' whose callous protagonist beds his girlfriend's best friend and pursues casual sexual encounters that he rates in terms of erotic fantasies generated by flesh magazines. Pfeil seamlessly fuses the personal and political. In ``The Angel of Dad,'' 35-year-old campus activist and bookstore clerk Max the Rad struggles to make a revolution and converses with the reappearing ghost of his sardonic, witheringly disapproving father. ``Almost Like Falling,'' the collection's novella, portrays a stressed-out single mother's one-night stand with a laid-off, alcohol-glazed Cleveland factory worker who's visiting Boston. Pfeil's stories are funny, touching, flint-hard and tender. (Dec.)