Jean McGarry has been praised for her ''deft, comic, and devastatingly precise portraits'' (New York Times Book Review) and as ''a writer who honors the human condition'' (Baltimore Sun). In her new collection of stories, Dream Date, she focuses her skills as a ''gifted observer'' (Publishers Weekly) on the delicate boundary that separates the real from the ethereal states we drift into and out of as we try to make sense of our relationships, romantic and otherwise, with the other sex. Funny and haunting in equal measureand suffused with a hint of the surrealMcGarry's stories explore the confusions, contradictions, and calamities of the modern relationship: in ''Paris,'' a woman tracks down her wayward husband in the City of Lights and ends up having a meeting of minds with his mistress that gives great satisfaction to both women; in ''Moon, June,'' a woman stalks the wardrobe of a wealthy socialite in a consignment shop, opening up a world of polymorphous delight and fashion envy; and in ''The Secret of His Sleep,'' a man wakes up after forty years to a reality that is at once strangely familiar and completely unexpected. In these wry fictions, real-world problems often have solutions fashioned with the stunning clarity and logic of a dream.
