URBAN ORACLES

Urban Oracles ($15.95 paperback original; Apr. 1997; 220 pp.; 1-57129-034-6): Fifteen erotic stories, rife with furtive sexual encounters, voyeurism, and daringly sensual imagery, from a highly acclaimed Spanish writer. Santos Febres's vigorously edgy, subversive tales tweak conventional pieties (e.g., in ``Mystic Rose'' and ``Stained Glass Fish'') and memorably sketch such unconventional souls as the woman who daily spies on her male neighbor showering (``Abnel, Sweet Nightmare''), and another who discovers that by adjusting her perfume she can control men's attraction to her (``Marina's Fragrance''). And Boccaccio might have liked ``Resins for Aurelia,'' in which a young gardener's fond relationship with the neighborhood whores takes a surprisingly ghastly turn. Much more than erotica, these blunt stories are crystalline glimpses of the psychology of obsession, by a writer whom we ought to know better.