FOUR DECADES

Weaver is a prolific short-story writer (seven volumes, including, most recently, The Way We Know in Dreams, 1994) and, as this sampler of nine tales drawn from his collections and three previously uncollected stories makes plain, he's also an extraordinarily skilled craftsman. The best stories here—``Hog's Heart,'' for instance, an ironic tale of the decline and death of a college football coach; ``The Good Man of Stillwater, Oklahoma,'' about an individual's slow slide into delusion and loss; and ``Getting Serious,'' which illuminates with a moving precision the hitherto unsuspected course of a man's life—are terse, carefully focused studies, turning on believable moments of crisis and revelation. While not a true ``Best Of'' collection (several of the stories, among them ``When Times Sit In,'' his first published tale, and the wanly experimental ``Whiskey, Whiskey, Gin, Gin, Gin,'' are unpersuasive), this nonetheless should serve to direct readers back to Weaver's large, often somber, and distinguished body of work.