For those familiar with the closing of the steel mills in Pittsburgh, Lolita Hernandez's first book of fiction might seem eerily familiar.

		"AUTOPSY OF AN ENGINE AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE CADILLAC PLANT" By Lolita Hernandez Coffee House Press ($14)

This collection of 12 stories is set in a Cadillac factory in Detroit that is in the process of shutting down. She details the struggles of the workers to cope with the loss of what served as a home for many years and with the loss of fellow workers, the "family" that labored and struggled together in that home.

Hernandez spent more than 30 years as a member of the United Auto Workers' union, 21 of them at the Cadillac Plant, so she knows her subject well and cares passionately about the characters who inhabit her stories.

While her writing sometimes has a documentary quality to it, and Hernandez is clearly drawing on her own experiences, what separates this from other working-class memoirs is its stylistic range and the artfulness of the prose.

Using epigraphs from such sources as Borges and Marx, Hernandez displays her sophistication as both reader and writer.

The stories range from "Down Dirty," a piece structured as a voice-mail message dealing with the consolidation that took place as the plant closed down, to "Thanks to Abbie Wilson," a story that veers into magic realism when the title character becomes so emotionally devastated by the plant closing that she in essence creates a "ghost" plant, re-creating and renaming places in the abandoned factory and bringing the assembly line back to life.

"We Have a Job for You" is the most poignant of these stories. Full of the cruel ironies created by the shutdown, it deals with the arrival of a crowd at the plant employment office because of a job rumor embellished by a minister as a way of giving his congregation hope.

The crowning irony occurs when a character who has been given her pink slip and has only a few days of work left herself is asked to interview the applicants to keep the crowd under control, even though no openings exist.

During Hernandez's long years in the plant, she surely witnessed and experienced sexual discrimination as a woman in what had been a male-dominated workplace. But when writing about this issue and others, Hernandez explores their complications and subtleties.

For example, in "Yes I Am a Virgin," Josephine, an older worker, hesitates to answer questions about sexual harassment from a labor relations intern because of the cultural and class chasm that exists between them.

Hernandez never resorts to a simplistic, preachy voice. She recognizes the humanity in all of her characters.

Even in "The Last Car," detailing the ceremonial assembly of the last Cadillac before the plant closing, Hernandez resists sentimentalizing her subject. She creates a haunting dream-like tone as she follows the car and the trail of workers following it down the line, capturing the complex combination of pride, fear and loss that this last car leaves in its wake.

These stories are told through the clear eyes of someone who can't afford to be sentimental while the task of making a living is front and center.

Yes, the workers in this factory form a kind of family, but it's a family whose history is quickly erased with the efficient dismantling of the plant, its members dispersed to other factories or to the unemployment line.

But Hernandez is the family historian, and she captures these stories so they will not be forgotten, so that evidence of what once existed is acknowledged, celebrated, mourned.

From reciting by memory the detailed contents of a toolbox to mapping out the complex layout of the factory, she makes her world real and accessible to all readers, and the humanity of the memorable characters that inhabit this landscape will make this experience powerful for all readers, whether they worked in a steel mill or a factory, a courthouse or a hospital.