For more than 100 years, Ireland has produced writers from County Cork who have a particular affinity for the short story.

	"A BIT ON THE SIDE: STORIES" By William Trevor Viking ($24.95)

His latest collection provides further evidence that his reputation as one of the finest authors of short stories in English is well-deserved.

Although born in County Cork, Trevor has lived for years in England, and these 12 stories alternate between the two countries.

His characters usually find their lives changed by circumstances difficult or impossible to control: economic conditions, class divisions, physical and emotional longing.

One of the most repeated words in these stories is "difference." Trevor is a Protestant raised in a predominantly Catholic country and an Irishman living in Britain. He knows how differences can separate and isolate people yet sometimes bring them together.

In "Sacred Statues," for instance, a pregnant wife in rural Ireland considers selling her baby so that her husband can continue to carve religious statues. The local Catholic pastor has no money to buy the figures, and the artist's only benefactor, a Protestant woman who appreciates the beauty of the sculptures, has fallen on hard times herself.

Such seemingly unsolvable conflicts are alleviated in part by the benefactor's kindness toward the artist and by the wife's love for her husband and his work.

As the title of this collection suggests, adultery is a frequent subject in the book, but the stories examine much more than extramarital affairs.

In the final analysis, these stories are about imagination and memory. While isolation in its infinite variety has pervaded Trevor's fiction for more than 50 years, this collection contains at least some stories that distinguish between loneliness and solitude.

In "Sitting with the Dead," a widow talks with the two women trying to comfort her and realizes that her husband's death is her release from a life stunted by fear.

In "Solitude," a woman who as a child attacked her mother's lover tells her story to strangers, believing that someone will eventually listen and not be horrified.

Ten of these stories have appeared elsewhere, seven in The New Yorker. Read together, they reveal patterns of language and behavior that enrich the work as a whole.

Even small things resonate -- an ashtray decorated with a goldfinch in "Graillis's Legacy," or the linen suit and green shirt of the lover in "Rose Wept" or something as simple as a lipstick smudge that echoes through several stories like a leitmotif.

The play of words and ideas in this collection should guarantee rereading. Before he wrote fiction, William Trevor was an art teacher and sculptor, and his fiction affirms the power of art and music to give order and beauty to an otherwise mundane life.

In "The Dancing-Master's Music," Brigid, a house servant, has her world transformed when she is allowed into the drawing room to hear a traveling musician's recital:

"[The music] scurried and hurried, softened, was calm, was slow. It danced over the scarlet walls and the gaze of the portrait people. ... Brigid closed her eyes and the dancing-master's music crept about her darkness, its tunes slipping away, recalled, made different. ... The silence was different when the music stopped, as if the music had changed it.

The stories have a similar effect. The silence that comes at the end of this book is different. The music of William Trevor's prose has changed it.