A Double Dose Of Fiction From Playboy, Esquire

America's most prominent men's magazines, Esquire and Playboy, have always prided themselves on publishing fiction by prominent or promising writers. This emphasis is spotlighted by a pair of new books - both burly, two-fisted story collections with high levels of testosterone.

There's some overlap among the writers: Thomas McGuane, Ray Bradbury, James Jones, Bruce Jay Friedman, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw, John Cheever, John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Collier, Norman Mailer and T. Coraghessan Boyle are all represented in both books. Still, the two collections are very different in tone.

With "Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction," edited by Alice K. Turner (Dutton, $25), there is - at last! - a collection for those of us who really do read the magazine for the articles. No need any more to thumb past those pesky photos!

Its structure is straightforward: one story from each of Playboy's years of publication. It kicks off with a self-conscious hipster tale from 1954, Charles Beaumont's "Black Country," and ends with Jay McInerney's ironic gem from 1993, "How It Ended."

The rest of the book, however, is lumpy. Playboy's reputation long has been that it tends to go for prestige - that is, to publish small-time pieces by big-name authors. "Playboy Stories," alas, confirms this criticism more often than not.

The wickedly brilliant Roald Dahl is represented, for instance, by the easily forgettable "A Fine Son." Pieces by such fine writers as Cheever, Bharati Mukherjee and Ursula K. Le Guin also are relatively minor; a first-time reader of these authors might not be compelled to rush out and find their other, better stuff.

On the other hand, there are good bits by the likes of Thomas McGuane ("Like a Leaf"), Charles Johnson ("Kwoon"), Bernard Malamud ("Naked Nude"), Bob Shacochis ("Easy in the Islands"), and Paul Theroux ("White Lies").

The much stronger collection is "Lust, Violence, Sin, Magic: 60 Years of Esquire Fiction," edited by Rust Hills, Will Blythe and Erika Mansourian (Atlantic Monthly, $25), which is a companion to the magazine's two earlier fiction collections. There are plenty of big names here, as in the Playboy collection, but the level of quality is higher.

There's also a wry introduction by editor-in-chief Terry McDonell that includes the story of how, in 1933, founding editor Arnold Gingrich got Ernest Hemingway, already a legend, to write for the fledgling magazine.

The book is divided into four sections, with stories corresponding to each category. Thus under Lust, we have Saul Bellow's sly "Something to Remember Me By" and Truman Capote's elegiac "Among the Paths to Eden." For Violence, there is Hemingway's classic "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," a creepy little Steinbeck piece, and Raymond Carver's quietly threatening "Neighbors."

For Sin, we sample writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald ("An Alcoholic Case"), Richard Ford ("Rock Springs") and Flannery O'Connor ("Parker's Back"). And for Magic, there's a chapter from William Kotzwinkle's best book ("Horst Badorties Goes Out," from his happily goofy "The Fan Man"), along with contributions from the likes of Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Louise Erdich.

Not everything in the Esquire collection is top-notch, and, as should be expected in any collection, not every story will appeal to every reader. But if this were a horse race, Esquire would win by a length.

Seattle writer Adam Woog's most recent books are biographies for young people of Louis Armstrong and Harry Houdini.