Arkansas

Here are three novellas of escape and exile touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In Saturn Street a disaffected L.A. screenwriter delivers lunches to homebound AIDS patients only to find himself falling in love with one of them. In The Wooden Anniversary Nathan and Celia - familiar characters from Leavitt''s story collections - reunite after a five-year separation. And in The Term-Paper Artist a writer named David Leavitt hiding out at his father''s house in the aftermath of a publishing scandal experiences literary rejuvenation when he agrees to write term papers for UCLA undergraduates in exchange for sex.