FICTION

RITA AND LOS ANGELES by Leo Romero (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue; $12 paper; 144 pp.). You won’t find any messages in this collection of short stories: Leo Romero, a Santa Fe bookseller and poet, is more archivist than artist, pulling from the files of childhood memory a few defining, character-shaping moments. In the title story, the best in the book, the narrator Michael writes of lost loves--his mother Rita’s for a man she barely knew (writer John Fante), his uncle’s for an artist of whom Rita disapproves, his own for Los Angeles . . . not the city but its representation in Michael’s bedroom, a buxom curly blond proffering a tray of oranges from the side of a wooden fruit box. “Rita and Los Angeles” chronicles countless mistakes and regrets, embarrassments and humiliations, but here these unhappy moments are transformed into something better by the redemptive powers of memory, by the act of writing.