SILK

Sensually charged and evocative debut collection of 11 stories set in a number of vividly rendered settings, including Paris, Japan, and Malaysia. A series of six related tales follow Cass, a young American raised in France, as she explores the uncertain terrain of desire, discovering, as she notes in the exquisite ``The Lights of Love,'' that the experience of love is tied in her imagination to the particular qualities of light, to the ``hidden and peculiar'' way in which love both illuminates and isolates us. A second related group of stories traces the collapse of a marriage and the emergence, in the title piece, of a woman's sensuality in her efforts to discover through love ``the language in which the world speaks to itself.'' Unusual, haunting tales.