San Francisco is a city that encompasses extremes and nowhere is this more evident than in the recent publication of two short fiction collections by local writers Kevin Killian and Peter Weltner. Neither Killian nor Weltner are neophytes -- both have published several excellent books over the last decade -- and these latest collections show them refining their craft and stretching their artistic muscles in decidedly different ways.

Anyone familiar with Killian's novel Shy or his memoir Bedrooms Have Windows will not be disappointed with Little Men. Newcomers to Killian's work will either love it or hate it, depending on one's tolerance for Killian's trademark techniques -- the blurring of fact and fiction, multiple levels of seemingly unrelated narratives, and the use of the author as a character. The pieces collected in Little Men showcase Killian at his darkest and kookiest, as though Dennis Cooper were writing synopses of the soap opera Santa Barbara.

Weltner, on the other hand, is more traditional in his narrative approach, though no less challenging. The stories in The Risk of His Music can all loosely be called love stories because they chart the emotional terrain characters travel in their relationships with others -- whether it's the love between two men who've been a couple for many years or the platonic love between two elderly friends. The stories in The Risk of His Music are all accessible, well-crafted pieces that emphasize character over plot and eschew sentimentality for an emotional clarity that can be heartbreaking.

Yet it would be a mistake to categorize either Killian or Weltner into neat, polar niches of "avant garde" versus "traditional" fiction because on closer examination, their work doesn't fit well into either of those convenient little boxes.

"I'll be writing two stories at the same time," proclaims Killian at the beginning of Little Men's long, mesmerizing story "Santa," "but think of this as no 'New Narrative' trick but as a kind of Victorian novel in miniature." Like a succession of little Victorian novels, Killian's stories weave strands of stories and characters, but the fact that these strands rarely seem to come together into traditional narrative is part of the point. They bounce off each other, sometimes with an easy grace and sometimes with a loud, disorienting smack.

Repeatedly, Kevin Killian the author uses "Kevin Killian" as narrator and character. "Chain of Fools" recounts young Kevin's sexual affairs with several priests as he's passed from one to the next like a paperback novel. In "Who is Kevin Killian?", Killian imagines himself injected with sodium pentathol and questioned about his habits, life, and fears by an unnamed and possibly imaginary interviewer. Are these pieces fiction or autobiography? Killian is thumbing his nose at such rigid distinctions and invites the reader to do so as well. But just when one is lulled into believing the author and the character are the same, Killian makes it obvious that he's writing fiction, as in "Father and Son," a collaboration with Josh Cherin, which imagines "Kevin," the gay, alcoholic father of 20-something "Josh," in his disastrous attempt to bond with his son at the premiere of Jurassic Park.

Oddly enough, when Killian writes stories that fit more traditionally into the "fiction" category, he produces his most successful and his most disappointing works. That's fine, because Killian writes with such felicity and precision that it's easy to forgive him the occasional failure. It would be difficult to imagine a more deliriously wicked story than "A Love Like That," a razor-sharp (pardon the pun) tour de force that re-imagines William Castle's 1960s slasher film Homicidal from the point of view of the transvestite killer. On the other hand, "Philosophy," reads like an uncomfortable mixture of de Sade, Dennis Cooper's Frisk, and Trainspotting that repels without offering much to redeem it besides sheer pluck.

The strengths of the stories in Peter Weltner's The Risk of His Music are those elements traditionally associated with quality short fiction -- complex, realistic characterizations; the orchestration of conflict into a rising arc that terminates in some form of resolution, no matter how transitory or unstable; and luminous, precise prose. These may seem rewards in themselves, but Weltner is not content to offer a smorgasbord of well-written stories. The order and arrangement of the stories, the recurring importance that music and art play, and the underlying themes of alienation and the search for love give The Risk of His Music the cohesive feel of a novel.

The collection is arranged into three sections, each marked with a roman numeral. The three stories in the first section all deal with gay men facing the death of friends rather gracelessly. Both "The Greek Head" and "Hearing Voices" focus on a pair of gay male couples and the effect the death of one has on the three that remain. Instead of taking the obvious route of detailing the pain and sadness of the "widower," Weltner examines what happens to the surviving couple and offers two very distinct variations. While "The Greek Head," an O'Henry Award-winning story, takes a realistic and explosive view of the situation, "Hearing Voices" hinges on a possibly supernatural encounter that throws the unsettling allure of death and madness into weird relief.

The middle section consists of a single story, "Self-Portrait with Cecil and Larry," which explores the unconventional love affair between a painter and his latest model, a dwarf wrestler. Like a rosy re-imagining of Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Cafe, this story serves as a delightful way station before the three dark, brilliant stories that make up the last part of the collection. It is in these stories that Weltner's gift for creating unsettling and ultimately redemptive fiction is most evident. Each tells of an encounter between two men that profoundly changes them both, yet the stories themselves are vastly different in specifics and approach.

One of the books gems, "Buddy Loves Jo Ann" is the understated and sometimes painful story of life-long friends Buddy and Jo Ann who have lived in the same small town for 70 years. When Jo Ann lies dying of cancer and asks Buddy to help her die, Buddy flees in panic to a seaside town where his despair eventually turns to hope after meeting a burly good Samaritan. No description of this story's plot can do justice to Weltner's evocation of a life that seems to have passed by without warning and without passion.

Killian and Weltner have put together collections to delight both readers who know their works and those coming upon these authors for the first time. The arrival of new books by two so different and talented writers is all the evidence one needs to prove that San Francisco's history of amazing and multi-faceted literary vitality will continue into another century.