THE WAY WE WRITE NOW: Short Stories...

THE WAY WE WRITE NOW: Short Stories From the AIDS Crisis edited by Sharon OardWarner (Citadel Press: $14.95; 294 pp., paperback original). The stories in this anthology reveal the breadth and depth of the AIDS pandemic. In “Imagine a Woman,” Richard Selzer describes a cultivated American savoring her last months in rural France. Alice Elliott Dark’s “In the Gloaming” depicts the struggle of an older couple to understand the death of a son they barely knew, while the dying narrator of Adam Mars-Jones’ “Slim” notes sardonically, “Illness has no qualifications. . . . But being ill--if you’re going to be serious about it--demands a technique.” Allen Barnett captures the despair of gay men who have buried too many friends and lovers in “The ‘Times’ As It Knows Us:” “But the words we use now reek of old air in churches. . . . Our condolences are arid as leaves. We are actors who have over-rehearsed our lines.”