TALKING LEAVES: Contemporary Native American Short Stories, <i> edited by Craig Lesley (Dell: $10).</i>

The authors in this anthology, who represent the Cherokee, Chippewa, Sioux, Navajo and Modoc cultures, write about lives caught between civilizations. Paula Gunn Allen (“Deer Woman”) and Gloria Bird (“Turtle Lake”) describe supernatural characters from ancestral myths who walk the contemporary world, unseen by Caucasian eyes. In Linda Hogan’s “Aunt Moon’s Young Man,” an older woman skilled in herbal lore finds her neighbors turning against her when she takes up with a dashingly handsome man from another tribe: “When Bessie walked down the busy street, one of the oldest dances of women took place, for women in those days turned against each other easily, never thinking they might have other enemies.” The bitter poverty and rampant alcoholism that blight life on the reservations provide the sub-themes in Beth Brant’s “Swimming Upstream” and Louise Erdrich’s “The Bingo Van.” The narrator of Mickey Roberts’ “The Indian Basket” reflects bitterly on the high prices collectors pay for the baskets his mother used to trade for second-hand clothes: “As we peddled our treasures in those early years, we probably appeared to be a pitiful people. We were, however, living in as dignified manner as possible while selling a part of our culture for a few articles of used clothing. We really hadn’t much left to give.”