Nine Inches, Paperback

``Nine Inches,`` Tom Perrotta's first true collection, features ten stories some sharp and funny, some mordant and surprising, and a few intense and disturbing. Whether he's dropping into the lives of two teachers and their love lost and found in ``Nine Inches,`` documenting the unraveling of a dad at a Little League game in ``The Smile on Happy Chang's Face,`` or gently marking the points of connection between an old woman and a benched high school football player in ``Senior Season,`` Perrotta writes with a sure sense of his characters and their secret longings.
``Nine Inches`` contains an elegant collection of short fiction: stories that are as assured in their depictions of characters young and old, established and unsure, as any written today.