It is good to report that realism in short fiction is alive and well.

Liars in Love is Richard Yates's first collection of stories since Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published nearly 20 years ago. It contains seven longish tales, only one of which is disappointing. Two are gems.

Set in New York's Greenwich Village during the Depression, "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" carefully details the trials of two children and their sculptor manqué mother, a foolish woman who is teetering "at the onset of a long battle with alcohol that she would ultimately lose." The story ends with the mortified children watching their mother engage in a drunken, bitter, anti-Semitic rage.

"A Natural Girl" begins with a sophomore coed telling her father that she doesn't love him anymore. "There's no more why to not loving than there is to loving," she remarks more than once in this story...