Epoch, a literary journal based in the English department at Cornell for the past 50 years, will have four of its stories included in Prized Stories 1997: The O. Henry Awards, one of the nation's most prestigious collections of short fiction. This is the highest number of entries from any single publication, including The New Yorker (which has three winning entries).

The Epoch pieces selected for inclusion are "The Balm of Gilead Tree," by Cornell's Robert R. Morgan, the Kappa Alpha Professor of English and an award-winning poet and novelist; "Dancing After Hours," by Andre Dubus, a renowned short-story writer from Massachusetts; "The Taxi Ride," by Patricia Elam Ruff, a fiction writer, commentator and lawyer; and "Catface," actually a suite of three short stories, by newcomer Arthur Bradford.

These works appeared in different editions of Epoch from late 1995 to late 1996 and were chosen from more than 2,500 stories in 210 U.S. and Canadian magazines, said Larry Dark, series editor of the O. Henry collection, which has been published by Doubleday with one interruption since 1919. There will be 20 entries in the '97 collection when it is published in hard-cover and paperback this October.

"This certainly isn't the first time Epoch has been represented in the O. Henry collection, but it is unusual for us to have this many stories," said Michael Koch, editor of Epoch and a Cornell lecturer in English. "For a magazine of our size, with a circulation of about 1,000, this is about the best news we could have imagined."

"Epoch is probably the best fiction quarterly in the United States," said Morgan, "and I feel lucky just to have gotten my work published there." Morgan's "The Balm of Gilead Tree" tells the story of a Vietnam veteran in North Carolina who witnesses a mid-air plane collision and participates in the looting of victims.

Edgar Rosenberg, a professor of English and comparative literature whose own first published work appeared in Epoch's second issue, said the latest recognition "is a wonderful example of Epoch's durability; we have outlasted all our competitors." He added, "the magazine owes its recent coups mostly to the savvy and dedication of its present editor, Michael Koch."

Koch, who became editor of the journal in 1989, oversees all aspects of its publication with help from students in Cornell's Master of Fine Arts writing program . He noted that in addition to its inclusion in the O. Henry collection, Epoch recently learned that two of its entries will appear in another important short-story collection, New Stories from the South, 1997, published by Algonquin Press.

Epoch was founded in 1947 by Baxter Hathaway, Goldwin Smith Professor of English, who remained editor of the journal for nearly 30 years and established Cornell's M.F.A. program. It was under Hathaway's editorship of Epoch that writers like Thomas Pynchon and Don de Lillo first broke into print and that Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates published some of their earliest stories.

The journal will celebrate its 50th anniversary this September with a two-day series of readings by former contributors.