TRANSACTIONS IN A FOREIGN
CURRENCY by Deborah Eisenberg
Knopf; 214 pages; $15.95
An eon from now, literary anthropologists will be able to reconstruct a state of mind, circa 1986, from the bones and shards in this distinctive collection. The stories are all in the first person, but each one presents a new character. An afflicted 15-year-old girl becomes involved with a 27-year-old man of ambiguous sexuality; an older woman, teetering on the edge of a breakdown, decides to jog instead of swim because "not only is running not cold, but I won't drown if I should stop suddenly"; another woman, traveling...