Alice Munro And William Trevor Are Masters Of The Short Form. By Piers Marchant THE MODERN SHORT story might be America's single greatest contribution to the world's lexicon of literature. It makes sense, after all: There is something quintessentially American about short stories. The form is as flexible as putty, first of all, able to be endlessly reinvented; it is immediate, shocking, beguiling the reader with secrets revealed, moments lost or suddenly regained. The perfect hit, the literary equivalent to a high-octane power lunch. Mildly surprising then, that two of the finest short story writers in the world, Alice Munro and William Trevor, from Ontario and Ireland, respectively, have so completely shaped the form to fit their talents. We live in a charmed time when both have extraordinary new collections to offer. There is a moment in a story called "Carried Away" near the end of Alice Munro's Selected Stories (Knopf, $30) where a woman meets with the ghost of her beloved, a man she only knew through letters and who died many years before during WWII, in a Toronto bus depot. Her reaction? "I don't recognize you." The scene is mystical, illuminating, finally allowing them to meet and discuss the life they never had a chance to share together, but it's also inconclusive. Is this woman hallucinating? Is it actually the man in question? Munro allows all possibilities; in the end the reader is left as in the dark as the character. "What place is this?" she asks, after the ghost has wandered away. It's a question that remains unanswered. William Trevor can be equally ambiguous. In "The Piano-Tuner's Wives" from his newest collection, After Rain (Viking; $22.95), an older woman who finally gets to marry the man she's coveted her entire life finds herself constantly in his deceased first wife's shadow. Her only recourse is to re-write the stories and descriptions his first wife gave to him, an action that the man, who is blind, acknowledges and accepts as the price to pay for sharing lives. Both Munro and Trevor write about specific landscapes: the small towns and cities near which they grew. Towns with names like Connacht, Munster, Rosedale and Hanratty that teem with cramped lives and desperate people. Their characters are infected with love, poisoned by jealousy, crippled by the choices and compromises they've made; and yet, in the end, they accept their lot, the only recourse they've been given. Trevor is the rarest of writers who can actually produce both novels and stories of equal caliber. His characters--old, young, professional, unemployed--cross each other's paths and clash with ideas. In "Timothy's Birthday," he tracks an older couple as they make their traditional preparations for their only child's 30th, while simultaneously tracking the son's rejection of them, sending a "servant" of his, a young, hoodish teenager, to tell them he can't make it. In the end, both parties are shown to be wounded. But they will survive. Trevor's writing is eloquent and clean. Direct, but also supple enough to seamlessly shift from character to character. He worked for years as a copywriter, and that type of exactitude is evidenced in his work. His ear is magnificent, capturing each subtle shade of accent and edge, each riff of language. In his work, as with Munro's, every character has presence and life, no matter how miserable or doomed that life may be. The best writers manage to have sympathy for all their characters; there is always more than one side to represent. Munro, who works almost exclusively with stories, pours different narratives together in an explosive and complex amalgamation. Ever daring, her Selected Stories runs chronologically, so you get a sense of the growing experimentation and risk-taking she's cultivated. Stories fly at you in torrents: narratives within narratives, bits of information projected to the reader through letters, songs, bits of scribbled notes. She was never simple. In "Royal Beatings," the relationship between a daughter and her stepmother is explored. At the heart of the story is the ruthless, primal abuse the daughter suffers at the hands of her father, goaded on by the stepmother. But rather than destroy the family, astonishingly, the abuse serves to clarify things. The night after such an ordeal the family is shown in good spirits, even the daughter, despite herself, enjoying the cathartic freedom of violence. Throughout the story, the stepmother is shown to be alternately awful and loving. Munro never lets you get away with a facile, one-dimensional take. In the end, she's as sympathetic as the daughter, theirs is just an unlikely and mutually antagonistic relationship that catches fire. Never an easy read, Munro has gotten more complex in her storytelling. From "Dance of the Happy Shades," a story from 1961 which follows a painful ritual party one of the local piano teachers inflicts on her students, to the vastly more cryptic and complex "Vandals," from 1993, about a young married couple who destroy an old house together, Munro's skill at detailing and empathizing her characters' lives is never less than clairvoyant. As dense and rich as extended novels, her stories are filled with undistilled power and complexity. Both of these collections show these writers at the peak of their formidable powers. If short stories are our lives in microcosm, then Trevor and Munro have seen the universe beyond that, and with these bewitching, breathtaking stories, they're able to show us a little of what they've witnessed. Both Selected Stories, by Alice Munro, and After Rain, by William Trevor, appear on The New York Times list of "Best Books of the Year."

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