Marsyas as Masochist.

WISCONSIN; UNITED States

The article evaluates the book "Skinned Alive," by Edmund White. This is the first collection of short stories by Edmund White. Fiction writers tend to shine in either the longer or the shorter form, rarely both. These debut stories are compulsive reading, but not quite up to the level of White at his best- if only because he's had less practice with the shorter form. The eight stories in "Skinned Alive" are all written in his factual, autobiographical mode, and all set in Europe, with three exceptions. In one of these, "Pyrography," the opening story, Howard and Otis are high school friends who go on a camping and canoeing trip in the Wisconsin woods, accompanied by Danny, whom they don't know well or fully trust.