CAT STORIES

Playful kittens and ruthless predators, beloved pets and witches'' familiars - cats of all kinds come alive in these stories. Maeve Brennan and Alice Adams movingly explore what cats can mean to their humans, while writers as varied as Patricia Highsmith and Fritz Leiber imagine the intriguingly alien feline point of view. Cats flaunt their undeniable superiority in Angela Carter''s bawdy retelling of ''Puss-in-Boots'' and Stephen Vincent Benét''s uncanny ''The King of the Cats'', while humour abounds in tales by comic masters P. G. Wodehouse and Saki. The essential unknowableness of cats inspires the most exotic flights of fancy: Calvino''s secret city of cats in ''The Garden of Stubborn Cats'', the disappearing animal in Ursula K. LeGuin''s brain-teasing ''Schrödinger''s Cat'', the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in Steven Millhauser''s ''Cat ''n'' Mouse''. In these and other stories, this delightful anthology offers cat lovers a many-faceted tribute to the beguilingly mysterious objects of their affection.