G21 ASIA has KIM CARTER back talking about another type of foolishness in "CANNIBAL ISLAND." POWERSBOOKS has our BOB POWERS with author, ABIGAIL THOMAS chatting about "Herb's Pajamas." TRIO: RADIO RAHEEM is back to explain the "PALACE COUP" --- at THIS MAGAZINE! CULTURE CAST's JENNIFER BLUE looks at the frenzy for "THE EGG." G21 WORDS features a new poem by NATHAN BLACK. G21 SOUTH AMERICA THOMAS HARGROVE Testifies before U.S. House of Representatives - [For the non-frames version of Mr. Hargrove's testimony, click here.--- Ed.]A follow-up to our 3-Part Series on Narco-terrorism and Kidnapping! FLISS USSHER's G21 EUROPE column LONDON CALLING! returns to the UK this week to kick off our special All Fools Issue. STONEWALL VIEWS' PHIL MARTIN announces "CURE FOUND FOR HETEROSEXUALITY!" TRIO THOMAS HART returns to tell "WHY I'M SO IMPORTANT" TRIO ROBIN MILLER makes the "CONFESSIONS OF A RESTAURANT BIGOT" ANOTHER Great Joke of the Day in THE HOUSE OF CARDS! JENNIFER BLUE's PLANETARY MADNESS looks at YOUR influences! BARE KNUCKLES: JEFF WINBUSH won't be seeing "Titanic." Read why here. Hello! Use The Message Board

The latest book from Thomas paints exquisite portraits of four apartment dwellers who live in a single block on the Upper West Side of that amazing place, the diverse and devastating New York City. "Herb's Pajamas" (Algonquin, $17.95) is my early choice as the best collection of fiction to appear in 1998. I can't imagine another book offering more pleasure and satisfaction than this utterly captivating little volume, terse and telling in only 199 pages.

First up is Walter, a man with insomnia, a worrisome daughter and an ex-wife who occasionally comes back to this apartment to spend the night. He remains in a state of numbness, not able to deal with the breakup of his marriage, two years after the day she moved out, "not (to) an abandoned dairy farm in Pennsylvania, not an orchard in upstate New York." She went downtown to Bleecker Street, "an apartment across from the butcher shop with rabbits hanging upside down in its windows."

Then there's Edith, a dotty middle-aged and overweight single woman with a mother nearing death. Edith seems of another time, another world, in her inability to connect with life in the late 1990s.

Next comes Bunny, a young girl who goes off in search of an older sister, along the way meeting people who offer insight and a moment's extension of help. Finally, there's Herb, still shocked from the death of a friend who left to smoke a Winston and abruptly died.

Thomas learned well one of the major lessons of writing: the magic comes in the details. She writes in a spare, matter-of-fact style that contains so many nuggets of truth that the reader easily enters into the worlds of these common yet uniquely fashioned people. E. Annie Proulx has written of Thomas's characterizations that she "turns on a dime and leaves you change."

Amazingly, Thomas didn't launch her literary career until she was 47, although she had worked in publishing for two decades as a literary agent and editor for New York's Viking Press. When she took up her pen, the work poured out. She published fiction in various magazines, and poetry in The Paris Review and The Nation. "Herb's Pajamas" is her third book of fiction.

Thomas lives on the 13th floor in a prewar building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, so she knows well the setting of her new book. "I get claustrophobic alone in an elevator, so I often climb the thirteen flights to home," she says. "It's great exercise and I've gotten good at it, and I know by the bright blue doormat that I'm a third of the way, by the bicycle and double stroller than I'm more than halfway. On another floor somebody's front door is guarded by what I thought at first were two black hockey pucks but turned out on closer inspection to be roach motels. It's not exactly finding your way home by bent grasses or shining white pebbles, but it will do."

She loves New York. "There is much misery here, and cruelty. But there is so much life. And you find dignity and beauty in unexpected moments."

She turned to writing when she enrolled in a workshop class taught by Bill Roorbach, then a student at Columbia and now working in the English Department at Ohio State University in Columbus. He read her a passage from a book that said, "In the beginner's mind are many choices. In the expert's mind are few." He told her that one should write with their beginner's mind, which is open to everything.

"The words have since lodged themselves forever in my brain. So you write from your beginner's mind. Aha, I thought. I finally qualified. . . Did I know what I was going to do? Hadn't a clue. I just finally put the pen on the page and began. If there is a moral here it is: that in order to do something you have to begin. You don't have to begin right. You just have to begin."

A portion of the comments by Abigail Thomas are used courtesy of FOLUSA News Update, a bimonthly publication of Friends of Libraries U.S.A. For membership and subscription information, call 1-800-9FOLUSA.