E-Mail This Article to a Friend Short but sweet Stories to warm the holiday hearth BY RICCO VILLANUEVA SIASOCO

THE UNDERLYING meaning of the word "collection" — in contrast to, say, a random bunch of stuff — is that a collection somehow bestows critical mass and importance upon a group. Think of the collection of Egyptian art at the Museum of Fine Arts or, in a more literary vein, Vladimir Nabokov’s daunting collection of butterflies, painstakingly catalogued, their delicate wings preserved in bold hues of gold and blue. Take a look around your own space: you’re probably collecting a jar of loose change or shelves of books too numerous to read in this lifetime.

The holidays bear their own kind of collections: tree ornaments and trimmings dug out of coat closets, or December’s soundtrack of "I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas" and "Here Comes Santa Claus," plucked from back-row status on your CD rack. We’re a community of collectors, looking for the next new thing to add to our Amazon wish lists.

Just in time for the holidays, here are a few suggestions for not-to-miss collections of the literary kind.

You Are Not the One, by Vestal McIntyre (Carroll & Graf, to be published January 2005; $13.95). Moonstruck writers often summon the work of Alice Munro if asked to describe a certain kind of storyteller who fuses the unreal with the obstinately ordinary. Vestal McIntyre, a young writer whose first collection, You Are Not the One, is forthcoming in January, duplicates this difficult feat.

In his wonderfully deviant story "Binge," McIntyre does Munro — but with a comic, acid edge. Lynn, the narrator of "Binge," is a coke-snorting, middle-aged pastry chef cavorting on the Upper East Side. She may be flirting with addiction, but she’s content to ride it for all it’s worth. McIntyre’s eye casts his heroine at an eerie, Gus Van Sant–like party where she congregates with New York hipsters and cast-aside old friends — all the while holding these strangers up to view with her husband, Charles.

McIntyre, whose qualities may be most apparent in his images and narrative high-wire acts, evokes the domestic concerns and strange musings of Alice Munro’s characters in a fast-paced setting altogether urban. You Are Not the One is a savage collection of stories that will entice fans of short-story masters like Denis Johnson and Lorrie Moore.

Honored Guest, by Joy Williams (Alfred A. Knopf; $23). Call it Cynicism Light. It’s the quality all Joy Williams’s characters seem to possess, a potent combination of jadedness (in The Quick and the Dead, Williams’s most recent novel, one of the main characters resigns himself to be haunted by the bossy ghost of his dead wife) and measured temperance (the same novel gives us a pre-teenager trying to prevent a blowout with her mother’s loser boyfriend).

In the title story of her eighth book (her third collection of stories; Taking Care and Escapes are her other fine collections, both available in Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks), Williams visits archetypal characters usually co-opted by beginning writers. The author imagines two characters, an angst-ridden adolescent contemplating suicide and her middle-aged mother suffering from a terminal disease — and, as Ezra Pound commanded his fellow Modernist poets, "makes it new."

Williams achieves what most writers can only attempt: she imagines characters whose MOs capture the complexity of being human — craving to do good yet inevitably falling from grace. Honored Guest is a treat for any reader interested in the trappings of the human heart.

Sightseeing, by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (Grove, to be published January 2005; $22). You’ve got to count on your friends. Sightseeing, the new collection by young author Rattawut Lapcharoensap, is recommended by Richard Gregg, events director at the Brookline Booksmith.

Stunning in their craft, evocative in their sunbaked setting, these stories avoid a tourist’s-eye view of Thailand, instead traveling deep into the heart of this country and its Westernized people. In his story "At the Café Lovely," Lapcharoensap portrays two adolescent brothers who have recently lost their father in an accident involving a shipment of American toys. In fact, the influence of American consumerism pervades this story, exemplified by the gaudy neon interior of a fast-food restaurant where the older brother treats his younger sibling to a birthday meal. In "Don’t Let Me Die in This Place," an American grandfather moves to Thailand with his son and Thai daughter-in-law. His displacement and cultural alienation are multiplied by a stroke — not to mention his distaste for his own mixed-race grandchildren. Political convictions, of course, stir many of these characters, most notably in "Priscilla the Cambodian" and "Draft Day," dealing with a refugee camp and military conscription.

Lapcharoensap crafts the seven stories in his collection with incredible realism and grace. Like his character Anek in "At the Café Lovely," Lapcharoensap is a young man coming into his own.

Unkempt, by Courtney Eldridge (Harcourt, $23). It’s unfair to call Courtney Eldridge the next Lydia Davis. Or to compare her dark, comic milieu with those of Angela Carter or Kathy Acker. Indeed, this wonderfully hip young writer, published in witty, cutting-edge magazines like McSweeney’s, Nerve, and the Mississippi Review, often conjures the muse of these pioneering female authors in her collection Unkempt. Eldridge, however, addresses the concerns and lives of young urban women — not the chick-lit-type, but female (and male, too) readers interested in subtlety, originality, and a fine voice.

The longest and most engaging of Eldridge’s seven stories (it’s more of a novella), "The Former World Record Holder Settles Down," is a memory piece of a woman whose claim to fame is that she’s slept with more men at one time than anyone else: nearly 200. It’s a hilarious, melancholy story in which the seemingly brash narrator appears to waiver between pride in her accomplishment and a desire to get back to basics like her Tuesday-night bowling league. The story is indicative of Eldridge’s quirky, seductive voice — a talent for language and rhythms that appeal both to the ear and to the mind.

Runaway, by Alice Munro (Alfred A. Knopf, $25). Most striking about Alice Munro’s 11th collection of short stories is the simplicity of her titles. "Chance." "Soon." "Trespasses." "Tricks." These stand in stark contrast to the title of her 2001 collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, a playful trip of the tongue.

Loyal readers know Munro territory well: the tug and pull of family, the sorrows and disappointments of women, the intersection of young love and old age. Runaway again visits these familiar themes. In the story "Powers," the young narrator is a Canadian woman whose talent for predicting the future conflicts with her relationships with her lovers and friends. "Chance" introduces a young woman named Juliet — the main character in a triptych of stories — and her almost unreal relationship with a married man. And in the title story, Munro gives her readers yet another young woman, living in a mobile home on a horse farm, paralyzed in an unhappy marriage.

It’s tempting to compare a short story by Munro to a maze, filled with dark corners and abrupt endings. We might be better off considering her work a circular labyrinth, in which the concentric paths invite meditation, the way into the story often also serving as a way out.

Animal Rights and Pornography, by J. Eric Miller (Soft Skull Press; $10.95). Here’s a checklist for the young writer J. Eric Miller. Style: Raymond Carver. Form: Amy Hempel. Content: Marquis de Sade.

It’s a strange merging of content and form, but one that Miller marks as uniquely his own. Like the work of the Marquis de Sade, these stories are not for the weak of heart. In Miller’s collection Animal Rights and Pornography, bestiality is only one of many forms of sex. This talented young author manages to seduce rather than repel, however; the power of Miller’s writing comes from his ability to engage his readers.

"Invisible Fish" brings us the owner of a pet store in a typical American mall who bludgeons a chimpanzee he believes to be the cause of other animals’ deaths. It’s a dark, atmospheric tale, evocative of Miller’s others, that seems to observe rather than judge. Animal Rights and Pornography will both disturb and enthrall — a true compliment in this age of staid, often cookie-cutter, writing-workshop prose.

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco can be reached at mail@riccosiasoco.com.