ONCE UPON AN EGYPT and down through time the silence of the written page has come to us from Thoth, that dog-headed, baboon god who invented the pabulum of primary schooling, the three Rs. He thus incurred the displeasure not only of an eternity of six-to-twelvers but of his own King Thamus. Once upon papyrus, divined the King, word (being voice) will live haplessly ever after. Thamus feared the act of "writing down" would breed only a heady scrawl of reminders, damning visceral memory and leaving humans vulnerable to the "depredations of forgetfulness" in their souls. Presenting a collection of stories by Toronto storytellers, Dan Yashinsky does not neglect to relate this myth in his prologue to Tales for an Unknown City. "Writing down an oral story is a little like scoring a jazz improvisation: the tune comes across, but the timeliness is lost," he concludes. Even the most commendable transcriptions of oral stories are doomed to - well, not failure, but a certain, inevitable rigor of print. Text cannot read its readers` hearts as a practised storyteller can her hearers` souls, adapting the choice and weight of words to stoke the gleams in her listeners` eyes. Fixed in print, stories can no longer flex their sets to reflect the environment of their audiences, as Robert Munsch so delightfully recounts in his contribution to this book, "Searching out Moira." Completing his telling of "Mud Puddle` (a puddle both ver. tical and fiendish) to an unreceptive Inuit audience, a child`s timid question, "What`s a mud puddle?," gave him a bold clue that at this latitude his villain had better be a snowbank! (One might well ask, then, why these urban storytellers tell so few distinctly urban stories.) And, of course, one longs to hear the tellers` voices instead of ones own. Three contributors "tell" Nasrudin stories; I wanted to hear their difference, to see and feel the distinct, gestural embodiments and vocal textures good tellings would give these tales. Dismayed at how long I took to read this book (I read only a few selections aloud), I realized I was reading slowly so as to, if only internally, hear each story, taste its syntax, let repetitions work their hypnosis and unfold as stories do in "oral" time, the time it takes to "tell" Although the improvisational elements of these "tunes" are fixed in print (storytellers will remind you they were once called singers), many are nonetheless enchantingly audible, from Michael Wex`s Yiddish hilarity of old Yoshe, forced back to his connubial duties by a vicious kugel (potato pudding); to John McLeod`s grand Nanabush, whose folly and cunning gave us "the shivering tree" we call poplar; to Lynda Howes tender return of Cinderella to her Grimm heart in "Aschenpottel." She restores Disney`s frowsy fairy godmother to her authentic dignity as a hazel tree rooted in Aschenpottel`s mother`s grave. The multicultural sampling these stories provide reflects the richness of Toronto`s - and Canada`s - ethnic resources. A few entries do not work. Carol McGirr`s "Nestled on the Edge," a reminiscence of the importance of the radio to her evolution as a storyteller, feels clumsy with fact amid the smooth fictions that surround it. And though colourfully rendered, "Gudrun`s Dreams," a two-page excerpt from the 79-chapter Laxdaela Saga barely stands on its own. Each entry is followed by a short statement regarding its source and/or relevance to the teller`s life. Placed before each tale, these would have helped establish an intimacy between storyteller and reader prior to the story`s reading. Many of these annotations tell how the tales were shaped by historical, individual, and social influences. Not that these are, however, mere histories, biographies, or social registries; for storytelling involves switching downward from these proprieties into (sometimes earnest) play, even in the most cautionary of tales. The Jablesse, jumbies, La Gahoos, and soucouyas of Theresa Lewis`s Caribbean Folk Legends are guaranteed to plant a moral caution in their readers` bones. These West Indian equivalents of our vampires and werewolves are unevenly portrayed by Lewis, however; she often slips into a journalist`s narrative distance from active, sensual presentations of her supernatural tales. She takes few risks with language; the colorations of patois only occasionally surface through a rhythmless reportage of plot. The best storytelling is, even in print, physically interactive with its characters, and so with its audience. The telling must be the tale. Only in the latter half of the book does this magic begin to happen and the air begin to truly rarefy, as in "The Nights of La Gahoos," where the devil collects on his inviolable contract with the avaricious friends, Herman and Horatio. Tales for an Unknown City ends by paying tribute to its listeners, whose necessary presence can never be forgotten by the storyteller. Whether we feet a part of these tales decides between well- and poorly crafted work. The best sparkle, keeping us, like ungrudging stepsisters, in awe of those who go down to the river of words and come back with a full bucket of fay story.