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THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES (334 pp.)--Edited by Martha Foley--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

Here are 28 stories which Miss Martha Foley, an old hand at editing this sort of anthology, says are the best of the past year. Perhaps they are the best; they are still not very good. Yet it is probable that if another editor had chosen them they would be neither much better nor greatly different. For these stories accurately reflect the work of the younger and more "serious" postwar writers.

If the reader expects stories of the war itself, he will not find them. Only a couple involve fighting men at all, and these have nothing to do with front-line action. More typical subjects in the current Foley collection:

P: A sensitive boy who mourns for the tarpon he has caught, and tries to coax it back to life.

P: A middle-aged immigrant who reverts to his childhood and plays in the snow after he loses his job.

P: Southern field workers who watch in confused and angry helplessness as the mechanical cotton-pickers arrive.

P: Mexican-American boys in zoot suits who are attacked by club-swinging sailors the night before they are to join the Army.

About the most that can be said for these younger writers is that they do not succumb to some of the faults of their literary elders. They do not force the complexities of life into a tight Freudian or Marxian formula, nor mutter Hemingway-hexed monosyllables through the corners of their mouths. And they do not mangle the language as did those who made the error of confusing themselves with James Joyce.

Such negative virtues are not quite enough. Miss Foley's contributors are earnest and well-intentioned, but nothing emerges boldly or sharply from their work. Lacking individuality or even eccentricity, most of the stories settle in the reader's mind like a grey blur. Though young in years, the writers seem old and weary in spirit.

Most of the contributors are committed to the conventional realism that has by now become a rut for American storytelling. They concentrate humorlessly on a social or psychological problem, they marshal bony facts in straight platoons of narrative, and they employ the English language with literalness and flatness.

New trails were cut when Sherwood Anderson rebelled against the O. Henry plot formula, when Theodore Dreiser discarded the genteel tradition, and when Ernest Hemingway sharpened and toughened the language. But the trails that were fresh and even perilous a few decades ago are now dusty and routine, and most of the writers in Miss Foley's collection are still stumbling along them.

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