DOMINOE

Playwright and children's writer AgÅeros offers a memorable portrait gallery of ordinary—though thoroughly individualized- -Puerto Rican New Yorkers; two of these eight well-crafted stories were previously published in Latino journals. Here are some of the expected, common images of Puerto Rican life—the men playing dominoes on the street, the young boy working in the family bodega, the hopeful entrepreneur selling food in the park—but there are more unusual characters, too, such as Vazquez, the horologist seen at work repairing antique clocks in a Greenwich Village shop. In each case, AgÅeros provides enough detail (without getting bogged down in minutiae) to capture the flavor and texture of daily life. In the quiet, poignant ``One Sunday Morning,'' a young boy loses first place in his godmother's life when she takes in the daughter left behind by a neighbor's suicide. And in ``Malig; Malig & Sal; Sal,'' a single mother, looking a man who can get her out of the projects, decides to break up with her suddenly impractical lover, Sal; college seems to have affected Sal's brain the wrong way and made him crazy; then, after violence erupts, a neighborhood junkie proves his knowledge of street medicine, keeping his injured friend Sal away from hospitals and the police. For his point of departure, AgÅeros often takes a character or situation so familiar as to border on stereotype, but in his hands, these small tales lead the reader to a deeper sense of recognition. Studies of character and community in the realist mode, told with quiet humor, without sensationalism or sentimentality.