DISORDERLY CONDUCT: The VLS Reader, edited...

DISORDERLY CONDUCT: The VLS Reader, edited by M. Mark (Serpent’s Tail: $12.95). This anthology of short stories from the Voice Literary Supplement offers an uneven array of contemporary fiction. In Bruce Brooks’ “Pulling Proofs,” a well-intentioned printer tries to create a meaningful gift for his worrisome girlfriend--and inadvertently confirms the differences that separate them. Sandra Cisneros describes life in a lower-class barrio, and how an unscrupulous drifter poses as the heir to the cultural treasures of the Mayas to seduce a teen-age girl in “One Holy Night.” “A Bastard Out of Carolina” by Dorothy Allison presents a vivid portrait of Southern black family life and a determined mother’s fight to remove the stigma self-righteous bureaucrats have attached to her child. On the down side, Harry Matthews’ “Country Cooking From Central France,” a labored spoof that might have warranted half a page in an old issue of Mad, goes on just short of forever. Karen Karbo attempts to depict the plight of a pair of Russian emigres in “Palace of Marriage,” but her characters talk (and act) like second-rate vaudeville dialect comics.