LOVE STORIES

Martin Levin's smartly efficient stakeout for this gallivanting subject is set forth in the preface: ""All about two creatures who find one another uniquely magnetic""--which neatly covers all these generally minor pleasures from major authors. Twenty-eight entries include some happy hearted, bantering, chirrupy collusions: Shirley Jackson's spatting singles; Victoria Lincoln's mating dance of mavericks; Vonnegut's wooing on a long walk; F. Scott Fitzgerald's flapper's frolic. Then there are a handful of faintly acidulous sparklers: Nabokov's wicked dousing of an old flame, Sean O'Faolain's rumination on the massive shifts of Irish female temperament, Singer's glass of tea about the penalties of devotion to a dead beloved, and there's Galsworthy's autumnal elegy to an old passion. John O'Hara, Leonard Wolf, Joyce Carol Oates and Doris Lessing find the thorns in those dream beds of roses. Among the oddments: de Maupassant's murder of devoted waterfowl, a futuristic valentine by H. G. Wells and oddest of all, Burroughs' hirsute account of ""Tarzan's First Love"" (""'Teeka is Tarzan's,' said the ape-man, in the low gutturals of the great anthropoids""). Present this entertainment to a loved one in a low guttural and lope off together into the sunset.