FICTION

LOVE IS STRANGE: Stories of Postmodern Romance Edited by Joel Rose and Catherine Texier (W.W. Norton: $12.95 paperback; 288 pp.) Never fear. The outsiders, freaks, geeks, hustlers, perverts, addicts and unclassifiables who didn’t make it into “The Literary Lover” have tumbled through the back door into this 16-story collection. They, too, seek love, and get it or don’t get it in a variety of ways that force a younger group of writers to stretch those traditional forms into some ragged but arresting new shapes.

A.M. Homes writes eerily of a teen-age boy’s passion for his sister’s Barbie doll. David Foster Wallace inflates the love of a health-food store owner in politically correct Northampton, Mass., into a spoof that’s half-Dickens, half-scientific case history. Lisa Blaushild’s narrator writes an acid letter to her rapist. Patrick McGrath presents adultery in London in 1936 under a patina of rain and medical grisliness. Barry Gifford uncorks another bottle of his patented brew of pseudo-documentary detail, low life and dead-on dialogue.

David B. Feinberg’s gay couple break up in splinters of bright cynicism that nonetheless draw blood. David Wojnarowicz’s gay drifter compares himself to “one of them kids they find in remote jungles or forests of India. A wolf-child.” Daytona Beach reveals the despair in the heart of a child molester. Co-editors Catherine Texier and Joel Rose measure up to the competition--she with a story about a Frenchwoman in love with New York’s movie-like decadence until she discovers it’s all too real; he with a story about twisted love in that same city’s crack-riddled, dead-end slums.

Is love stranger than it used to be? Perhaps not, but the problems of writing about love seem to have increased since the tide of the sexual revolution collided with the undertow of the Age of AIDS. The resulting currents, rips, whirlpools are treacherous--as writers young enough to be lovers themselves know better than anybody.