This collection-derived from many impulses but unified through one distinctive sensibility-contains passionate subversive acts of language, oblique takes on American life, outbursts of comic genius, long meditations on the cruelty of contemporary customs, and funny, disturbing glimpses of daily life. Reality is rendered pitilessly real, and fantasy bares its teeth.   At once playful and devastatingly serious, the works in this collection employ a variety of forms-genres, anti-genres, fantasies, games-while highlighting the dangers and delights of contemporary life: Hollywood, tsunamis, war, the art world, AIDS, ambition, weapons of mass destruction, family values, perverse sexualities, urban violence, small change and big bucks, are all used to chum the waters of imagination and truth.