Rechy's novel, "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens," is a potent compound of sex and rapture. Lyle is a beautiful and beguiling young man who starts out as the child of star-crossed lovers in a sleepy Texas town and ends up as "the Mystery Cowboy," an enigmatic figure who materializes among the lost souls on Hollywood Boulevard. This remarkable story, as Rechy tells it, is sly, smart, sexy and laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also tinged with sorrow and ultimately elevated into the realm of magic. Rechy renders the mean streets and the elegant watering holes of contemporary Los Angeles with a wry and knowing sense of humor.

-- Jonathan Kirsch

*Little Infamies

Stories

Panos Karnezis

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 282 pp., $24

Picture a ramshackle Greek village of no more than 30 houses, a place so far off the beaten track that the government is planning to build a dam on its site and relocate the inhabitants. Envision a crumbling church, a tavern, a barbershop, a butchery, a coffee shop, a dilapidated train station, whitewashed houses and a cast of variegated eccentrics including a sour, narrow-minded, but not entirely unsympathetic priest; a lonely spinster given to afternoon dreams; a clerk who tries to teach his parrot to recite Homer; a landowner so cruel and rapacious, he's a veritable mini-Stalin; and a widower so crushed by his wife's death in giving birth to twin daughters that he keeps the girls chained up like dogs.

The 19 linked stories that make up Panos Karnezis' noteworthy fiction debut, "Little Infamies," reveal a grim bedrock of poverty, superstition, filth, mean-spiritedness and hardship beneath the deceptively picturesque surface of a quaint village. Innocence, sweetness and hope exist, but they often prove to be delusions. Love, when it does occur, all too easily turns into poisonous hate. Karnezis is a deft stylist: clear and direct, yet subtly ironic -- a style well-suited to the short story. And, like many of the masters of this genre -- Guy de Maupassant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty -- Karnezis is adept at delivering one startling surprise after another.

-- Merle Rubin

*Lost Light

A Novel

Michael Connelly

Little Brown: 362 pp., $25.95