AUDIO BOOKS LEAP INTO UNABRIDGED TERRITORY.

Byline: Dick Lochte and Tom Nolan Special to the Daily News

Listeners are requesting books and stories narrated in their entirety. And publishers are hearing them, offering an ever-increasing array of unabridged tapes, from audio originals to current best sellers.

Among the latter is Jon Krakauer's nonfiction success ``Into Thin Air'' (BDD Audio, nearly eight hours; $29.95), a first-person account of the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest. Krakauer, on assignment for Outside magazine, was among those who reached the summit and returned safely; but a dozen others died in the aftermath of a sudden storm. The journalist's detailed chronicle moves with the awful inevitability of a tragedy, one in which courage and folly, bravery and hubris, cooperation and selfishness are all on display - sometimes in the same person.

This cleanly written narrative makes all too comprehensible how weather, chance, illness, fatigue and the mental confusion caused by oxygen depletion all contributed to the fatal outcome. Woven into the story of the expeditions is a history of past attempts to scale Everest. Krakauer's stolid narration - as straightforward and unmelodramatic as his prose - has a cumulative intensity that proves quite powerful.

The pleasures of unabridged fiction can be sampled in bite-size chunks through ``The New Yorker Out Loud'' (Mouth Almighty, approximately two hours, 30 minutes; $19.95), which presents five of the more accessible of that once-fiction-proud magazine's recent short-story offerings. Three of the tales are very effectively read by their own authors. John Updike shows an actor's aplomb performing his ``New York Girl,'' a commuting businessman's remembrance of a bittersweet Manhattan adultery.

In ``Us or Me,'' Englishman Ian McEwan describes a handful of strangers acting together but ineffectively in a moment of crisis. Another English writer, Martin Amis, gives a subtly low-key reading of ``What Happened to Me on My Holiday,'' a story of youthful illusion and loss. One definition of a short story is that it captures a moment after which nothing is the same. That seems to apply to these five entries and especially to Lorrie Moore's powerful ``People Like That Are the Only People Here,' '' whose first-person female-writer narrator copes (angrily, ironically, messily) with her young son's illness. Moore's story (by far the longest in this fine collection) is given a superb performance by Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand.

More homage to shorter fiction is paid by mystery maven and Mysterious Ink bookstore proprietor Otto Penzler, who has edited ``Sounds Like Murder,'' a series of six original mysteries, each presented unabridged on a single cassette (Random House Audiobooks, two hours; $16.95). Best of the good batch is Stephen Solomita's ``The Poster Boy,'' read by Jason Culp, which finds a police detective under investigation for shooting an armed youth. S.J. Rozan's ``A Tale About a Tiger,'' read by Patricia Kalember, is an amusing case for the author's private-eye team of Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, slightly dated by the discovery of Viagra.

In Christopher Newman's ``Good Clean American Fun,'' read by Darrell Larson, a proposed theme park, infidelity and greed lead to murder. ``Driving Lessons'' by Ed McBain, read by Barbara Rosenblat, follows the investigation of a traffic fatality, as the death of a pedestrian run down by a student driver gradually changes from an apparent accident to a possible murder. June Thomson's ``The Case of the Scottish Tragedy,'' read by Simon Jones, chronicles a new adventure with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. And Peter Lovesey's ``The Sedgemoor Strangler,'' read by Barbara Rosenblat, takes us to a village in the British countryside where the murders of a number of young women fail to sway a beautiful barmaid from her devotion to a handsome stranger.

Most audio books - mysteries and thrillers included - are still primarily abridged. A good example is Stephen Hunter's current ``Time to Hunt,'' read by Beau Bridges (BDD, six hours; $22.95). Hunter's popular ``Bob the Nailer'' Swagger, the sniper's sniper, returns, this time battling an assassin who killed a young Marine named Donny Fenn during the final days of the Vietnam War. In the intervening years, Swagger has had two violent encounters with figures from the long ago (``Point of Impact'' and ``Black Light''). Now married to Fenn's widow, he has settled down to a more or less peaceful family life in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho when, once again, his brutal past catches up with him. This time there's more at stake than merely his own mortality.

We're not sure if Hunter had a series in mind when he created Swagger, but he endowed the character with enough complexity and richness to carry three novels, each of which is powerful enough to succeed on its own. This is particularly true of ``Hunt,'' which makes brilliant use of two suspenseful cat-and-mouse confrontations between Swagger and his equally proficient steel-hearted adversary, the first in killing fields of Vietnam, the second in this country's snowier climes. Fire and ice. Beau Bridges has made a career out of limning good ole boys, and his moderately twangy narration fits Swagger's personality as comfortably as a well-worn Stetson.

Sabin Willett's ``The Betrayal'' (Random House Audiobooks, four hours; $24) is a better-than-average new suspense novel read in abridgment by Tony Award-winning actress Judith Ivey. When interim director of the Office of U.S. Trade Representative Louisa Shidler's name turns up on a $50 million Swiss bank account she knows nothing of, she's charged with bribe-taking and influence-peddling; the real culprits kidnap her 12-year-old daughter and warn Louisa to plead guilty. Helped by a journalist pal, a female lawyer friend and other allies acquired in the course of a plot that zips from Washington to Geneva to Paris to Wyoming, Shidler tries to rescue her daughter and save her own reputation. The talented Ivey brings Willett's well-drawn characters to vivid life.

Sabin Willett is one of the latest lawyers-turned-novelists in the tradition of Scott Turow. But the best-selling Turow was a writer even before he hung out his shingle. ``One L'' (Simon & Schuster Audio, three hours; $18), Turow's 1977 nonfiction account (with names changed) of his first year at Harvard Law School became almost required reading for a generation of legal students and is read here in abridged form by actor Paul Rudd. Closely observed people, honestly earned suspense, intelligent prose and fine points of law - all hallmarks of Turow's novels - are abundantly present in this engrossing true-life account.

Though not quite in Turow's class, Portland, Ore., defense attorney Phillip Margolin has been entertaining readers with such courtroom fictions as ``Heartstone'' and ``But Not Forgotten.'' His increasing popularity has prompted BDD to present his latest, ``The Undertaker's Widow,'' in an unabridged format (BDD, eight hours; $29.95), a wise choice, since the tale's complexity and detail are paramount to its full enjoyment. The title refers to state legislator Ellen Crease, a controversial politician who stands accused of murdering her husband, a funeral parlor tycoon. The death occurred in the course of an apparent robbery. Crease, a former policewoman, dispatched the intruder on the spot, but not before he shot and killed the undertaker. The prosecution, abetted by an intrepid police detective, believes Crease hired the intruder and participated in her spouse's demise. She claims she's being set up for political reasons. An amazingly ethical judge suffers life-threatening pressure from both sides. Margolin keeps the action hopping at a fast clip, and narrator Jason Culp effectively turns the prose into prime audio.