In Sharp Focus

...Though it strikes me that Harold Brodky and Mark Halperin are essentially novelists whose stories would benefit from expansion, both Brodky's "Verona: A Young Woman Speaks" about a pampered child's almost religious ecstasy of loveand Halperin's "The Schreuderspitze"a densely philosophical fable about a weakling who decides to become a hero—are stunning examples of pieces that start, and finish, in imagination...

...The spiritual anxiety she experiences (much like Schorer's couple) verges on panic when she discovers that she can no longer connect with the plight of others...

...Locked up in a cabinet with his'favorite novel, Madame Bovary, Kugelmass is transported into the languishing Emma Bovary's arms...

...By far the best story in Solo, it typifies the Tragic category...

...It isn't simply that greater control, or art, is required (what good writer is lacking in technique...

...In the same room with her husband, she decides to sleep now and then on the floor, "not to deny him but to become Will...

...If the divisions under which the stories are classified Struggle, Tragedy and Independence seem arbitrary, in many instances the overall thematic scheme invites new, unsuspected meanings...

...A huge ugly lamp in their apartment becomes a symbol of their own alienness and inadequacy...

...Solo makes critical use of a special angle of vision...

...William Abrahams, in his Introduction to the 58th O. Henry annual, calls attention to a general discontent with naturalism and detects a return to fantasy and myth: "stories that begin in imagination rather than in observation...

...The heroine's pilgrimage in grief ends in a symbolic union with "the universal element...

...Paper $1.95...

...veteran anthologist Leo Hamalian and his wife Linda have collected 27 stories of high quality by women writers about "woman alone...

...The difference, she suggested (alas, I lack her exact words), was one of texturethe novel being loose-knit and expansive, the short story taut as a tightrope and unswerving in its focus...

...The old woman who stubbornly refuses to go to a nursing home in Margaret Lamb's "Management" ends up being manipulated...

...but that our interests and visions have grown so diffuse we can no longer see things fixed and whole...

...The narcissistic hairdresser in Joyce Carol Oates' "6:27 P.M...

...In the first group of stories resignation (as distinct from surrender) is the key, and irony the prevailing tone...

...Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, Ann Beattie and Paule Marshall are among the writers who deal with the theme of Independence...

...Two schoolgirls from different social levels enter each others' worlds temporarily when one of them discovers the lure of tattooing...

...Where the heroines are eccentric in their ability to cope with the single state, like Rhys' tramp, the theme's currentness is lost...

...Most sardonic of all, a career woman who throughout her life "has feared places where one faced the self...

...The high point of the comedy is reached when his students wonder as they read the novel what that "bald Jew kissing Madame Bovary" is doing on page 100...

...Its legend-like opening "there was a woman who for a time loved a younger man"contrasts sharply with its short, flat declarative sentences stripped of psychological connotation...

...without the crutches of other people," in Edna O'Brien's "The Love Object," compromises with "alone-ness" by accepting the burnt ashes of a lost love...

...One morning as the heroine gazes out the window, she yearns "to become like a snowflake, volitionless and yet pure will...

...staff member, New York "Times Book Review" On Public Television recently, Eu-dora Welty made a significant distinction between the novel and the short story...

...If the novel has become the more congenial form for our day, however, the swifter, nourishing pleasure of the short story remains the testing ground for literary talent: Of the many good volumes of short stories published every year, those that stand out hint at new departures...

...Besides irony, there is compassion in Jean Stafford's "I Love Someone...

...His leading example is the First Prize story from the New Yorker, Woody Allen's "The Kugelmass Episode," a wildly funny tale about an unhappily married college professor who chucks his analyst for a magician...

...Reviewed by Nona Balakian Author, "Critical Encounters...

...In the case of the two books under review, although innovation has not been a hallmark of the O. Henry Awards annual, it has consistently maintained a level of excellence...

...It moves on from a sedate Jamesian style to deal with a spiritual form of anxiety that leaves realistic observation behind...

...This astute observation not only reflects on a major snag in the women's liberation movement, it also accounts for much of the desperate, erratic behavior of current heroines...

...In "The Tattoo," Joyce Carol Oates also writes from inside her characters, but not with the same intent...

...The invisible, ineradicable tattoo of social conditioning is revealed as a tragedy in which the saddest thing is that there is no sadness...

...367pp...

...The Hamalians have rounded up a remarkable troop, from tramp to opera singer, old ladies on welfare checks to a variety of dispirited spinsters, widows and divorcees...

...Proud and self-aware, this spinster knows the real source of her isolation: "I have taken all the detours around passion and dedication .. . traveling in anticipation of loss...

...Perhaps the keenest insight in this group of stories come in "Pure Will" by Harriet Zinnes...

...and while Prize Stories 1978 keeps close to the New Yorker/A tlantic/Esquire complex, the selection process has been extended to include 120 magazines...

...Solo: Women on Woman Alone Edited by Linda Hamalian and Leo Hamalian Delacorte/Dell...

...Susan Eng-berg's "Pastorale," on the other hand, embodies a modified naturalism that characterizes many of the stories in the volume...

...That explained for me why it is getting harder and harder for truly superior stories to be written...

...Here, in a flash, the desire for a new self is seen fixed and whole...

...escapes a suffocating marriage but (in typical Oates fashion) remains mired in her narrow life...

...It is a beautiful story, and it illustrates perfectly Miss Welty's image of the "tightrope...

...unluckily, in the middle of a passionate embrace, he remembers an appointment with his wife at Bloomingdale's...

...Just as Woody Allen's story "begins in imagination," so Mark Schorer's last story, "A Lamp," begins in the traditional...

...The emblematic image Zinnes produces is shiny and new as only the short story or poem—can make it...

...By juxtaposing the drab vulgarity of one life against the arrogant callousness of the other, Miss Oates deftly avoids both pity and censure...

...In other cases, like Marshall's militant black girl, transcendence simply involves a too-ready acceptance of social commitment...

...It is obviously a parody of the Absurd, of trendy literature, and as such it is a perverse kind of triumph for naturalism...

...This anxiety is experienced by a middle-aged American couple newly settled in Rome who are engulfed in the esthetic cornucopia of that great city...

...Cloth, $10.00...

...The sense of aloneness of Miss Eng-berg's heroine is something the editors of Solo can easily understand, yet her rather "normal" release from it is far afield from the premise Linda Hamalian outlines in her probing Introduction: "Although aloneness is a state of being all men and women must experience at some time in their lives, women have regarded it as damnation exemplified, whereas men have taken it as a natural, inevitable aspect of emotional development...