<DIV><BR>Masters of short fiction illumine questions of pain, suffering, medicine, fate, and, most starkly, &ldquo;Why am I dying?&rdquo; Circling in psychological time, Tillie Olsen depicts the death of a working-class grandmother, a past proletarian revolutionary in Russia, and how her death devastates her family in mid-twentieth-century America. Leo Tolstoy&rsquo;s cancer-ravaged Czarist bureaucrat weighs his life, searching for semblances of meaning in a linear, realistic story.</DIV>