BOOK REVIEW : Short Stories: A Clear View From ‘Inside’ : THE IOWA AWARD The Best Stories From Twenty Years, <i> Selected by Frank Conroy</i> ; University of Iowa Press $22.50, 329 pages

The Iowa Award is a short-story competition held yearly by the University of Iowa, whose writing program is considered to be one of the finest in the country. Each year, not just one story but an entire collection of short fiction by an up-and-coming author is selected by a single judge and published by the university’s press.

This handsome volume, well-edited by Frank Conroy, brings together one story from each of the winners from 1970 to 1990.

In the past, judges have included some of the best contemporary American fiction writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, John Hawkes, Frederick Busch and Raymond Carver. As one might expect, this anthology is an eclectic volume, reflecting the judges’ preferences as well as the diverse voices of the authors.

What is striking is the high quality of fiction by the award winners. With a few exceptions, these are quietly powerful and engaging stories, finely crafted, concerned, moving and compact tales that are more “vivid from the inside,” to borrow a phrase from Stanley Elkins who judged the award in 1978.

Take the story “Eminent Domain,” for instance, by Dan O’Brien, the 1986 winner. A man who collects junk cars, an old recluse named Willy Herbeck who has bad teeth and a much younger wife (how could such an ugly old geezer have attracted this wife? his neighbors wonder), refuses to sell his land to the government, though authorities have threatened to take it under laws of eminent domain if he doesn’t. Willy barricades himself in the cab of one of the old cars that litter his property and holds off the law, as his wife attempts to negotiate.

The story suggests there’s a sense of home that can’t be compromised--not for any amount of money, not under any laws: It’s really about the mysteries of love, revealed in the intensely sympathetic moment between husband and wife at the story’s end.

“Little Bear,” by Robert Boswell, the author of two novels (“Crooked Hearts” and “The Geography of Desire”) is a 1985 story about two war buddies who help each other survive in Korea by telling stories. What you need in war, as in life, this story suggests, is a single compatible soul to help you out when needed. It’s not surprising, then, that Tim O’Brien, author of the moving Vietnam saga of friendship, “The Things They Carried,” was the judge that year.

Diane Benedict’s “Crows” is a story that takes off fast and soars. It isn’t arch or fancy, it’s so real: it’s Raymond Carver with less hope (ironically, Carver chose this author’s work). “The Abandoned Hope” is in fact the name of a used car lot run by Rich Stutts. Stutts, his friend Jim Wesley White and Eugenia, a church-going woman with a sensuous past, are caught in a triangular alliance of sex, old wounds and misunderstanding. The story has a singularly haunting quality, an eeriness, the kind of mystery present in Charles Baxter’s stories, and it comes to an unexpectedly violent, uncompromising conclusion.

The stories from the ‘70s reflect a more naive America in certain ways. “American Gothic,” by Philip O’Connor, winner of the award in 1971, is about a group of rowdy boys who commit petty crimes. There’s a disagreement between two boys, Ditch and Abner, and a gun is produced. The gun so shocks everyone that the gang of boys, afraid things have gone too far, simply dissolves. Twenty years later, in an era when teen-agers shoot each other over designer clothes, there’s an almost wistful innocence about this tale.

“The End of the World” from 1974 is a stunning story about two people who meet at a plasma center, where they each routinely sell blood for money. They fall in love and conceive a child, to be called Consuelo, “their consolation.” “What else had they found that distracted them so utterly from Armageddon?” They find themselves considering unheard-of sacrifices for this new generation they may never see grow to maturity.

Other contributors include James Fetler, Sharon Dilworth, Russell Working, Susan M. Dodd, Abby Frucht and Miles Wilson, whose story “Wyoming” is a quirky tale about a man at a point of change and a woman hitchhiker he picks up who he realizes cannot speak, yet she releases in him his pent-up feelings through her sensual, worldly acts of abandon.

“The Venus Tree” by Michael Pritchett (selected by Robert Stone in 1988) is another haunting story, austere, understated, the tale of a dying man in which the word AIDS is never mentioned, though it hangs over the story like the bitter name of an unspoken enemy. Pritchett’s images, as Stone puts it, “seem compounded naturally out of the weather of his people’s lives.”

Frank Conroy has provided a short (two-page) introduction, so perceptive one wishes it were longer: “It maybe that part of the crisis of postmodernism,” he writes, “is because in our advanced materialism and spiritual confusion we are no longer so sure what it is we want to say about the world in which we live.”

If the novel leans toward the past, as Conroy believes, the short story seems suited to the present, to capturing the nebulous, unsettled now. It’s the quick snapshot of a culture caught unaware. It gives us questions, if not answers. Think of this volume as a vivid album covering 20 years of life in America.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Girls in the Grass” by Melanie Rae Thon (Randam House).