TELL ME: 30 STORIES (2002)

The opening of ''An Amateur's Guide to the Night'' finds a 17-year-old narrator stargazing from the passenger seat of her date's car: ''Behind us, in the little back seat, my date's friend was kissing my mom.'' She's one of several adolescents in this collection, but even its adults think like dreamy and anxious teens. The sparest of her stories are hardly there; the best are crisp sketches of hopeful Americans -- a college football coach on his way up; the fiancee whose intended has had a run of bad luck; Boffo, ''the girl clown, who hosted Channel 22's Midday Matinee.'' Robison's sense of comedy is so inseparable from empathy that a grin cracked at her characters' foolishness is a smile of self-recognition.