You could feel the longing in the room, you could touch it--a hundred lantern slides ran through their minds; their long- ing united them, each rendered innocent by this moment of extreme suspense. A new book by Edna O Brien is always an event of magnitude, but Lantern Slides, her first collection of short fiction since her acclaimed vol- ume of selected stories, A Fanatic Heart, is a high-water mark in her career, for it shows this marvelously intuitive and incisive writer at the very peak of her powers. The twelve stories in Lantern Slides take place in Ireland, in England, or in the vaca- tion locales her characters have al- ways veered to. Wherever they are, the restless, passionate, and search- ing men and women whoin O Brien brings palpably to life come tace to face with their profoundest tears, desires, regrets, and joys. "Oft in the Stilly Night" describes the denizens of a small village and the passionate dramas that have been enacted there. "Brother" is a monologic tour de force in which a sister reviles her brother-lover, who has taken a wife. In "What a Sky," a woman visits her aging, ailing father in a nursing home.