The New York Times

December 4, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR: 1994

SECTION: Section 7;   Page 65;   Column 1;   Book Review Desk

LENGTH: 16423 words



This list has been selected from books reviewed since the Christmas Books issue of December 1993. The list suggests only high points in the main fields of reader interest, and it does not include titles chosen by the editors of the Book Review as the Best Books of 1994. Books are arranged alphabetically under subject headings. Biographies and memoirs of people known for their contributions in fields other than literature and history are listed in appropriate categories.

Art, Music & Popular Culture

AS SEEN ON TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s. By Karal Ann Marling. (Harvard University, $24.95.) Themes of the mythic decade -- Disneyland, tail fins, Elvis and others -- shrewdly observed by a witty, rompish historian.


BRANDO: Songs My Mother Taught Me. By Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey. (Random House, $25.) Mr. Brando at 70 (can this be?) spares some living people but is amply tough on himself in this vulgar, funny, revealing memoir.

CIGARETTES ARE SUBLIME. By Richard Klein. (Duke University, $21.95.) People smoke them because they are dangerous, and for a lot of other reasons as well, according to this polemical, analytical, lit-critical, theoretical, political ode to deathweed by an up-to-date professor of French.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF HAROLD CLURMAN: Six Decades of Commentary on Theater, Dance, Music, Film, Arts and Letters. Edited by Marjorie Loggia and Glenn Young. (Applause Books, $49.95.) Fully a third of the journalism of the theater's distinguished gadfly and cheerleader over a long, long time.

THE COMIC STRIP ART OF LYONEL FEININ GER. Edited by Bill Blackbeard. (Kitchen Sink Press, $24.95.) This book of Feininger's 51 color strips, reproduced from the rare original Sunday pages from 1906 and 1907, shows that one of the founders of the Bauhaus was also a master of lyrical comics.

THE COMPLETE LYRICS OF IRA GERSHWIN. Edited by Robert Kimball. (Knopf, $45.) More than 700 lyrics displaying the inventive rhymes, supple phrasing, intelligence and wit that made Gershwin a lyricist nobody can read for one minute without humming.

ELLA FITZGERALD: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz. By Stuart Nicholson. (Scribners, $23.) A British critic's life of a distinguished interpreter, born in wretched circumstances, whose performances reveal only that she loves to sing. A big discography comes with it.

FEELING THE SPIRIT: Searching the World for the People of Africa. By Chester Higgins Jr. (Bantam, $50.) Wonderfully evocative images of Africans and their descendants everywhere, by a staff photographer at The New York Times.

IMAGES: My Life in Film. By Ingmar Bergman. (Arcade, $27.95.) At 75, the great Swedish film maker confronts and reveals himself as artist and man in this evocation of his career, based on a fresh viewing of all his movies.

JOE PAPP: An American Life. By Helen Epstein. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) This biography of the fabulously energetic, effective theatrical producer depicts a New Yorker whose street-fighting skills lent authority to his art.

JOSEPHINE: The Hungry Heart. By Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase. (Random House, $27.50.) Prodigious research and outstanding narrative fluency mark this biography of Josephine Baker (1906-75), the irresistible American institution of French revues, cabaret and film.

LAST TRAIN TO MEMPHIS: The Rise of Elvis Presley. By Peter Guralnick. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A meticulous marshaling of the facts about the ascendant career of a "real decent, fine boy" whose rise to the top (10 million singles for RCA in 11 months in 1955-56; he was 21) startled him as much as it did the rest of the country.

THE LATE SHIFT: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night. By Bill Carter. (Hyperion, $24.95.) It wasn't as easy as offering Mr. Letterman $1 zillion, as this detailed, gripping account by a Times reporter shows.

MARK ROTHKO: A Biography. By James E. B. Breslin. (University of Chicago, $39.95.) This account of the tormented artist's life, by a professor of English, is well researched, well written and carefully thought out.

MASTERS OF AMERICAN SCULPTURE: The Figurative Tradition From the American Renaissance to the Millennium. By Donald Martin Reynolds. (Abbeville, $67.50.) A clear, readable guide, handsomely illustrated, to modern American figurative sculpture.

MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY: The Civil War in Art. By Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely Jr. (Orion, $60.) The art that recorded and remembered the war, explored for its intentions, its effects at the time and its uses in a struggle to control the collective memory of Americans.

ON THE REAL SIDE: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying -- The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard Pryor. By Mel Watkins. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50.) The creative dealings of black folk with the paradox of life in a land professing equality; by a former editor at the Times Book Review.

SEDUCTIVE CINEMA: The Art of Silent Film. By James Card. (Knopf, $35.) A film collector and historian leads readers on a quirky and crotchety yet fascinating tour of the era of silent films, which he considers the glory period of cinema.

SEX AND SUITS. By Anne Hollander. (Knopf, $25.) An art historian endorses fashion's claim to be an art, concentrating on the development of the tailored suit as an aspect of modernism.

SIT! The Dog Portraits of Thierry Poncelet. With text by Bruce McCall. (Workman, $19.95.) Seventy "aristochiens," 19th-century portraits, each overpainted with a suitable dog's head, accompanied by thumbnail biographies.

TURKISH TRADITIONAL ART TODAY. By Henry Glassie. (Indiana University, $65.) The modernizing Turkish republic of this century cared nothing for the nation's traditional arts, but they survived and prospered regardless, as witness this splendid, richly illustrated examination by a distinguished folklorist.

UNDERSTANDING COMICS. Written and illustrated by Scott McCloud. (Kitchen Sink Press/Harper Perennial, paper, $20.) Beginning with the idea that the language of comics is rich, complex and subtle, Mr. McCloud, like a practiced modernist, deconstructs the comic code with both pictures and words.

VERDI: A Biography. By Mary Jane Phillips-Matz. (Oxford University, $45.) This portrait of the composer, an important account that alters accepted understanding on matters large and small, portrays him as a brutal and self-indulgent man with a remarkable capacity for lust, love, anger and compassion.

WALT IN WONDERLAND: The Silent Films of Walt Disney. By Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman. (Giornate del Cinema Muto/Johns Hopkins University, $39.95.) Part studio history, part oral history, part film critique, this entertaining and scholarly book, illustrated with animation drawings, storyboards and rare photos, covers Disney's crucially formative period in silent animation, before the Mickey Mouse era.

WINCHELL: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. By Neal Gabler. (Knopf, $30.) The life of Walter Winchell, inventor of the modern gossip column, who reached two-thirds of adult Americans in the 1940's and left behind him a national habit of confusing notoriety with news.

WISHING ON THE MOON: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday. By Donald Clarke. (Viking, $24.95.) Mr. Clarke's thorough and valuable biography of this doomed artist conveys a vivid sense of the forces that shaped her character and made it inseparable from her music.

Biography, Autobiography & Memoir

THE ANTI-EGOTIST: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. By Paul Fussell. (Oxford University, $23.) The old devil analyzed and explicated not only as the author of "Lucky Jim" but also as poet, literary critic, anthologist and moral satirist on the order of Pope and Swift.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE. By Lucy Grealy. (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95.) A poet's memoir of a truly harrowing childhood: attacked at 9 by a bone cancer that consumed her face, she spent 18 years in surgical reconstruction; her moral and psychic survival is miraculous.

BRECHT AND COMPANY: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. By John Fuegi. (Grove, $32.50.) The founder of the International Brecht Society gives us telling evidence that Brecht was a bully all his life, trading sex for text and making his collaborators think they were working for the cause of world revolution.

A BUNDLE FROM BRITAIN. By Alistair Horne. (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $23.95.) A generous chronicle of loyalty and gratitude to the Americans who sheltered a British boy during World War II, sparing him both the blitz and the agonies normally inflicted in upper-class schools.

CAPONE: The Man and the Era. By Laurence Bergreen. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) A massive, thoroughly researched examination of the most celebrated mobster of the Prohibition era, who attained dominance in his field at the age of 28.

THE CATCHER WAS A SPY: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. By Nicholas Dawidoff. (Pantheon, $24.) Berg's legend as ballplayer, spy, linguist and universal genius loomed far larger than Berg's reality; Mr. Da widoff's painstaking research reveals the intelligent, ingenious charmer who cast so great an image.

CHRISTINA STEAD: A Biography. By Hazel Rowley. (Holt, $37.50.) The difficult life of a fine and strangely mimetic novelist; Australian born, she had no real home but her writing captured whatever environment she occupied.

COLORED PEOPLE: A Memoir. By Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Knopf, $22.) A distinguished American scholar's intricate, captivating account of the rich family and community life of black people in Piedmont, W.Va., on the eve of desegregation.

DAISY BATES IN THE DESERT. By Julia Blackburn. (Pantheon, $22.) A bold biography whose author risks identifying with the consciousness of her subject, an adventurer, a self-taught anthropologist who studied the Australian aborigines, and a liar who invented her past anew at every turning of her life.

D. H. LAWRENCE: The Story of a Marriage. By Brenda Maddox. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Lawrence's violent life with the formidable Frieda Weekley, who bedded him 20 minutes after she met him, makes for absorbing if unappetizing reading.

DR. JOHNSON & MR. SAVAGE. By Richard Holmes. (Pantheon, $23.) Mr. Holmes re-creates Johnson's pre-Boswellian existence as a sort of belated adolescent, an impoverished bohemian wandering the streets of London with his friend, the barely tolerable Savage, whose biography became Johnson's first great work in prose.

A DRINKING LIFE: A Memoir. By Pete Hamill. (Little, Brown, $21.95.) Mr. Hamill's brutally honest account of his drinking (and his father's) is the organizing theme for the 37 years covered here, but the more fundamental matter is a fine portrait of the emerging artist, boy and man, in a New York that is no more.

EDITH WHARTON: An Extraordinary Life. By Eleanor Dwight. (Abrams, $39.95.) This life of the novelist in whose work architecture serves virtually as a language lays special emphasis on the houses and gardens Wharton inhabited and carefully made her own; copious illustrations.

ELDEST SON: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, 1898-1976. By Han Suyin. (Hill & Wang, $27.50.) An affectionate and persuasive portrait of the man who was China's prime minister for 27 years and whose role in history was to ride the tiger of Mao Zedong.

E. M. FORSTER: A Biography. By Nicola Beauman. (Knopf, $30.) What every general reader should know about Forster and his generally shackled life, occasionally punctuated by little bursts of liberation.

EXCURSIONS IN THE REAL WORLD: Memoirs. By William Trevor. (Knopf, $23.) Not an autobiography but a series of sketches from the life of the marvelous Irish short-story writer; well mannered, persuasive, showing exceptional powers both of re-creation and forgiveness.

FAMILY. By Ian Frazier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) An extraordinary history of an ordinary family, in which the author plays the roles of gossip, pedant and loyal member, yielding a reunion strangers are welcome -- and fortunate -- to attend.

THE FAMILY HEART: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out. By Robb Forman Dew. (Addison-Wesley, $22.) The author, a National Book Award-winning novelist, describes the repercussions in her family when her son revealed his homosexuality.

FATHERALONG: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society. By John Edgar Wideman. (Pantheon, $21.) An illuminating book-length essay that concerns many things, chief among them the author's struggle to bridge the gulf between himself and his father.

FIFTY DAYS OF SOLITUDE. By Doris Grumbach. (Beacon, $15.) The record of a self-inflicted isolation in a Maine winter, taken by a distinguished writer as a test of character and a quest for "that mysterious inner place."

GAL: A True Life. By Ruthie Bolton. (Harcourt Brace, $19.95.) The true story, transcribed from tapes, of a South Carolina woman's triumph over intimidation and abuse.

GEORGE WALLACE: American Populist. By Stephan Lesher. (William Patrick/Addison-Wesley, $29.95.) Governor Wallace presented as above all a populist protest politician, articulating the complaints of "average" people.

GOEBBELS. By Ralf Georg Reuth. (Harcourt Brace, $27.95.) How a cunning, hardworking and fanatical political operative had the good sense to attach himself to Hitler's rising star.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE: A Life. By Joan D. Hedrick. (Oxford University, $35.) A substantive, scrupulously researched life of the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with cogent analyses of the book and the moral universe that gave rise to it and to other controversial works by Stowe.

IN PHARAOH'S ARMY: Memories of the Lost War. By Tobias Wolff. (Knopf, $23.) The follow-up volume to Mr. Wolff's memoir "This Boy's Life" is a series of small, elegant, personal sketches of his year in Vietnam.

JAMES BEARD: A Biography. By Robert Clark. (HarperCollins, $27.50.) A painstaking, admirably unvarnished life of the great cooking teacher and food writer whose career, occasionally embarrassed by tinges of greed and cynicism, spanned the postwar era of American infatuation with food as an art form.

JUSTICE LEWIS F. POWELL JR. By John C. Jeffries Jr. (Scribners, $30.) An illuminating biography of a pivotal Justice of the Supreme Court whose instinctive conservatism was always tempered by his respect for the rule of law and his willingness to listen hard.

KAY BOYLE: Author of Herself. By Joan Mellen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) A fervent telling of the turbulent and unexamined life of a modernist author whose popularity peaked in the 1940's.

KNIGHT'S CROSS: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. By David Fraser. (HarperCollins, $30.) A thoughtful, most readable life of a remarkable soldier, by a senior British general.

THE LAUREL AND THE IVY: The Story of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism. By Robert Kee. (Hamish Hamilton/Viking, $29.95.) An intelligent, shrewd examination of Ireland's pre-eminent nationalist of the 1880's and of the absurd domestic drama that brought him down.

LEARNED HAND: The Man and the Judge. By Gerald Gunther. (Knopf, $35.) Penetrating and delicate, this study of a judiciary eminence known for his self-restraint and fortitude explores the inner tensions and doubts that shaped Hand's character.

LEAVING HOME: A Memoir. By Art Buchwald. (Putnam, $22.95.) What he's really trying to do with his humor, Mr. Buchwald says, is get even for a dark, poverty-stricken childhood. Most readers would agree his revenge is complete.

LENIN: A New Biography. By Dmitri Volkogonov. (Free Press, $30.) The wrath of a former believer runneth over in this polemic by a Russian archivist who has discovered enough smoking-gun documents to argue that every disaster of the Soviet Union was the fault of its founder.

LIVE FROM THE BATTLEFIELD. From Vietnam to Baghdad: 35 Years in the World's War Zones. By Peter Arnett. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A lean, engrossing memoir of reporters and war by a correspondent who was among the first to arrive and the last to leave in Vietnam, and virtually the only voice from Baghdad during the gulf war.

LOST PURITAN: A Life of Robert Lowell. By Paul Mariani. (Norton, $27.50.) This approach to the "real" character of a protean confessional poet uses letters and diaries to reveal a writer whose fascination with preachers, statesmen and generals hints at restlessness with his own art.

NIXON: A Life. By Jonathan Aitken. (Regnery, $28.) A Member of Parliament argues that Nixon was the century's most innovative foreign-policy President and was wrongly condemned for Watergate and the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam.

NO ORDINARY TIME. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. By Doris Kearns Goodwin. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Prodigious research lies behind this engrossing, colorful view of a changing nation as experienced by White House dwellers and habitues.

OLEANDER, JACARANDA. A Childhood Perceived: A Memoir. By Penelope Lively. (HarperCollins, $20.) The British novelist's reflective, lyrical account of her childhood in Egypt before and during World War II.

PARALLEL TIME: Growing Up in Black and White. By Brent Staples. (Pantheon, $23.) This memoir by an editorial writer for The New York Times is a complex work of vivid self-scrutiny, a portrait of the worldly education of a young black man who made it, haunted by the specter of a brother whose life was ended at 22 by gunshots.

A PASSAGE TO EGYPT: The Life of Lucie Duff Gordon. By Katherine Frank. (Houghton Mifflin, $27.50.) An engaging life of a clever valetudinarian from Britain's upper crust, whose letters from Egypt in 1865 were instrumental in the creation of Britain's interest in that country.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF CHAIRMAN MAO: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician. By Li Zhisui. (Random House, $30.) A detailed recounting of Mao Zedong's prodigious hankerings for fatty pork, young women and sleeping pills.

RAGE AND FIRE. A Life of Louise Colet: Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse. By Francine du Plessix Gray. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50.) A well-documented and spirited biography of the beautiful, impetuous and indiscreet Parisian poet with whom Flaubert had a stormy affair while working on "Madame Bovary."

A REBEL IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald. By Michael Wreszin. (Basic Books, $30.) An enthusiast of Macdonald describes the intellectual journalist's peripatetic path through American letters and American politics.

RED AZALEA. By Anchee Min. (Pantheon, $22.) In this memoir of growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, sexual freedom becomes a powerful political as well as literary statement.

ROALD DAHL: A Biography. By Jeremy Tre glown. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This deft, revealing unauthorized biography of the bullying author of children's books serves as an antidote to Dahl's own sparky but none-too-truthful image of himself.

ROOMMATES: My Grandfather's Story. By Max Apple. (Warner, $19.95.) An enthralling novelistic memoir of the infinitely durable Herman (Rocky) Goodstein, who at 93 accompanied Mr. Apple to college and proved, in the long run, to be worth all the trouble he caused.

SEARCHING FOR MERCY STREET: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. By Linda Gray Sexton. (Little, Brown, $22.95.) An intimate account of growing up the daughter of a mad, child-abusing, suicidal, brilliant poet, and of resolving such an upbringing from the inside out.

THE SHADOW OF THE PANTHER: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America. By Hugh Pearson. (Addison-Wesley, $24.) A de romanticized portrait of the celebrated Black Panther Party leader, with attention both to his brilliance at organizing and to his reliance on criminal brutality.

SHOT IN THE HEART. By Mikal Gilmore. (Doubleday, $24.95.) This highly personal family memoir, by the youngest of Gary Gilmore's brothers, is also a tale of the author's exclusion from his violent family.

THE SILENT WOMAN: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. By Janet Malcolm. (Knopf, $23.) In the course of a contrarian approach to the Plath myth (genius-housewife crushed by odious male poet), Ms. Malcolm raises pages of provocative questions about the values, and value, of biographers.

SPLENDOURS AND MISERIES: A Life of Sacheverell Sitwell. By Sarah Bradford. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) Ms. Bradford, an expert biographer, illuminates the Sitwell era and the remarkable success of Osbert, Edith and Sachie at being taken at their own valuation.

THE SWEETER THE JUICE. By Shirlee Taylor Haizlip. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) This history of the author's many-colored family provides not only a portrait of the life of the black bourgeoisie and a glimpse into her heart, but a meditation on the meaning of race in America.

THIS YEAR IN JERUSALEM. By Mordecai Richler. (Knopf, $23.) An engaging novelist's report on his youth as a Zionist and his travels in Israel, ventures that leave him content to be a Canadian.

TRUE NORTH: A Memoir. By Jill Ker Conway. (Knopf, $23.) The sequel to "The Road From Coorain" begins with the author's arrival in the United States from her native Australia for graduate school and concludes as she becomes president of Smith College in 1975.

UNDER MY SKIN: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. By Doris Lessing. (HarperCollins, $25.) A remarkable life in a remarkable place -- the declining British Empire in Africa -- told by a novelist who for three-quarters of a century has conceded nothing to political, psychological or literary fashion.

A WHOLE NEW LIFE. By Reynolds Price. (Atheneum, $20.) The record of a distinguished writer, struck with an agonizing and paralyzing cancer at 51, who learned in the hardest possible way who he was and who he had to become.

Business & Economics

INSANELY GREAT: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. By Steven Levy. (Viking, $20.95.) An unabashed fan of the Macintosh gives an enthusiastic account of how a bunch of freewheeling thinkers developed the first friendly computer.

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES. Volume 2: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937. By Robert Skidelsky. (Allen Lane/Penguin, $37.50.) How Keynes reshaped the world's economy, made a lot of money and married a ballerina, by an economics professor whose mastery of many subjects seems to match Keynes's own.

A JOURNEY THROUGH ECONOMIC TIME: A Firsthand View. By John Kenneth Galbraith. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95.) Born in 1908, the preternaturally lucid and articulate Mr. Galbraith has kept his eyes open ever since and seen a great deal he didn't care for.

LEAN AND MEAN: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility. By Bennett Harrison. (Basic Books, $25.) An economist's polemic against analysts who see small, efficient businesses as the models for social organization in a world of rapid change.

LOOKING AT THE SUN: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System. By James Fallows. (Pantheon, $25.) Firsthand insights into 11 nations are expanded into the argument that the United States has misunderstood East Asia's growth because its own laissez-faire economic traditions do not fit the Asian experience.

LORDS OF THE REALM: The Real History of Baseball. By John Helyar. (Villard, $24.) A financial journalist traces the history of the baseball business and marvels at the owners' behavior.

MASTER OF THE GAME: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner. By Connie Bruck. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) The inner truth of this amazing entrepreneur may not be within human grasp, but Ms. Bruck, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes known what seems knowable.

PEDDLING PROSPERITY: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations. By Paul Krugman. (Norton, $22.) In a wide ranging and lucid compendium of acute observations about economic thinking, a superstar of the economic world deplores the "age of the policy entrepreneur: the economist who tells politicians what they want to hear," extracting larger lessons about the tension between academically correct and politically useful ideas.

A PIECE OF THE ACTION: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class. By Joseph Nocera. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) The story, told with flair and insight, of mutual funds, credit cards, certificates of deposit and the other instruments that have transformed the finances and the lives of millions of Americans.

RECKLESS DISREGARD: Corporate Greed, Government Indifference, and the Kentucky School Bus Crash. By James S. Kunen. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) Twenty-four children and three adults died. Who killed them -- a drunken driver or the Ford Motor Company?

Children's Books

CITY DOG. Written and illustrated by Karla Kuskin. (Clarion, $14.95.) A city dog gets a dream holiday in the country, and the reader gets a verbal and visual romp. (Ages 5 to 8)

FLIP-FLOP GIRL. By Katherine Paterson. (Lodestar/Dutton, $13.99.) Vinnie and Lupe, two girls whose lives are in tatters, find friendship and ways of coping in this fine and moving novel. (Ages 8 to 12)

FLOUR BABIES. By Anne Fine. (Little, Brown, $14.95.) A dismal class of 14-year-old boys must treat six-pound bags of flour like babies for three weeks, with results that are both moral and comic. (Ages 10 and up)

MY BROTHER, MY SISTER, AND I. By Yoko Kawashima Watkins. (Bradbury, $16.95.) This powerful sequel to "So Far From the Bamboo Groves" describes three brave siblings and their difficult years in Japan after the end of World War II. (Ages 11 and up)

MY HOUSE. Written and illustrated by Lisa Desimini. (Holt, $15.95.) With a crazy patchwork of paint, collage and photography, the author evokes a child's wonderful view of home. (Ages 2 to 5)

PINK AND SAY. Written and illustrated by Patricia Polacco. (Philomel, $15.95.) The author tells the true and powerful story of her great-great-grandfather, a flag bearer in the Union Army who was rescued on a bloody battlefield by a young black soldier. (Ages 5 to 9)

A TEENY TINY BABY. Written and illustrated by Amy Schwartz. (Orchard, $15.95.) This memoir of an egocentric infant who takes charge of his two adoring, moderately anxious adults is at once hilarious and poignant. (Ages 2 to 6)

THE THREE GOLDEN KEYS. Written and illustrated by Peter Sis. (Doubleday, $19.95 until Dec. 31; $22.50 thereafter.) This exquisite homage to the magical, mysterious city of Prague is cast as a fairy tale. (All ages)

TIME FLIES. Written and illustrated by Eric Rohmann. (Crown, $15.) One dark and stormy twilight, a bird flies into what seems to be an old museum filled with the skeletons of prehistoric creatures, and they are, for a while, magically transformed. (Ages 4 to 7)

TUTANKHAMEN'S GIFT. Written and illustrated by Robert Sabuda. (Atheneum, $15.95.) In this appealing, boldly illustrated story, a meek and shy boy becomes a pharaoh and honors the Egyptian gods. (Ages 6 to 9)

Crime

BLACK BETTY. By Walter Mosley. (Norton, $19.95.) In Mr. Mosley's fourth novel about the black Los Angeles private detective Easy Rawlins, Easy agrees to track down Black Betty, "a great shark of a woman" who figured conspicuously in his own earlier life.

THE CAVEMAN'S VALENTINE. By George Dawes Green. (Warner, $19.95.) Romulus Ledbetter, Mr. Green's protagonist, is a homeless, black, paranoid private eye who can be roused to propriety only by a case as interesting as the one Mr. Green has dreamed up for his first novel.

DIRTY WHITE BOYS. By Stephen Hunter. (Random House, $21.) In this violent, blood-soaked story about three convicts who break out of jail and cut a murderous swath across Texas and Oklahoma, the most monstrous death is the death of the American family.

DOGS OF GOD. By Pinckney Benedict. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.) There are forces so malevolent in this lyrical, violent existential thriller about a mountain man named Tannhauser and a simple knight named Goody that one fears for the sanity of the storyteller.

THE FLANDERS PANEL. By Arturo Perez-Reverte. (Harcourt Brace, $21.95.) A sleek, sophisticated, madly clever chamber mystery about chess, life and art.

14 PECK SLIP. By Ed Dee. (Warner, $19.95.) In this punchy, drop-dead novel by a former cop, a stakeout at the Fulton Fish Mark leads two policemen to dredge up a barrel out of the East River. What they find is not the mob burial they expected.

A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN. By Lawrence Block. (Morrow, $20.) The tone is autumnal, the humor is dark, the veteran detective Matthew Scudder is sober and the case concerns the soaring death rate in a private men's club.

MENACED ASSASSIN. By Joe Gores. (Mysterious Press/Warner, $19.95.) A gutsy, inventive novel in which the head of San Francisco's police task force against organized crime deals with a maniacal killer and a nerdy paleoanthropolgist.

MUCHO MOJO. By Joe R. Lansdale. (Mysterious Press/Warner, $19.95). The discovery of a child's skeleton sets two unlikely detectives on the path of a murderer in a tough east Texas town.

ONE FOR THE MONEY. By Janet Evanovich. (Scribners, $20.) A Jersey girl with Spandex bike shorts and turquoise eye shadow sashays into the business of crime-busting when she's laid off from her job as a discount lingerie buyer.

A SUPERIOR DEATH. By Nevada Barr. (Putnam, $19.95.) A sternly beautiful novel, in which Anna Pigeon, the rugged heroine of "Track of the Cat," takes an assignment in Lake Superior's Isle Royale National Park and finds herself surrounded by weirdos and fears of the deep.

THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL. By Ed McBain. (Warner, $21.95.) Mr. McBain's latest three-ring circus of a mystery begins with a bang and sets out to solve the riddle of why the lawyer-sleuth Matthew Hope is lying comatose in a Florida hospital.

WILD HORSES. By Dick Francis. (Putnam, $22.95.) Once again Dick Francis, the former jockey, gives us a clear view of the beauties and squalors of the racing world.

THE YELLOW ROOM CONSPIRACY. By Peter Dickinson. (Mysterious Press/Warner, $18.95.) A violent death in an English country home uncovers a great scandal in this intellectual shell game whose resolution is delightfully disorienting.

Essays, Criticism & Letters

BEYOND DESPAIR: Three Lectures and a Conversation With Philip Roth. By Aharon Appelfeld. (Fromm, $17.50.) The Israeli novelist argues that literature can and must deal with the Holocaust or give up its pretensions to be a vehicle of spiritual apprehension.

THE COLUMBIA HISTORY OF AMERICAN POETRY. Edited by Jay Parini. (Columbia University, $59.95.) Essays by 31 scholars, many of them quirky, opinionated and authoritative; revaluations and reverberations abound.

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WALTER BENJAMIN, 1910-1940. Edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. (University of Chicago, $45.) Selected letters of an international icon of high culture whose foreshortened life lent glamour to his notoriously difficult thought.

A CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK. By Irving Howe. (Harcourt Brace, $27.95.) The book Howe was working on at his death last year, a collection of freestanding essays on the art of fiction, is mainly a record of the pleasures of thinking, and thinking acutely, about novels.

IN TOUCH: The Letters of Paul Bowles. Edited by Jeffrey Miller. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Selections from the "out" box of the enigmatic writer, composer and Tangerine; often forthright and withdrawn at once, some of them contain passages as brilliant as any in his printed work.

JOURNALS. By Bertolt Brecht. (Routledge, $39.95.) Twenty years after their publication in German, these journals offer a fascinating document of the years between 1938 and 1953 as seen first by Brecht as a comfortable exile from Hitler's Germany, then as a prestigious beneficiary of the East German state.

MAKING MALCOLM: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. By Michael Eric Dyson. (Oxford University, $19.95.) Malcolm X is the thread that stitches together these eloquent, freewheeling essays on hip-hop culture, black films and the tragic lives of poor black men.

MEA CUBA. By Guillermo Cabrera Infante. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) In these irritable, catty, irreverent essays, written between 1965 and 1992, the Cuban novelist grapples mostly with the exquisite travails and martyrdoms of intellectuals under Casto's regime.

ONE ART: Letters. By Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Robert Giroux. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) A handsome collection of letters from a poet whose output was so small, and so good, that her every opinion and observation is more than welcome.

THE WESTERN CANON: The Books and School of the Ages. By Harold Bloom. (Harcourt Brace, $29.95.) A brave, formidably learned and often very sad response to the current state of the humanities, with 36 pages of appendix identifying the real canon as the author sees it.

WITCHES AND JESUITS: Shakespeare's "Macbeth." By Garry Wills. (Oxford University, $25.) In his imaginative engagement with this notoriously unlucky play, Mr. Wills tries to claim its lost historical dimension.

Fiction

THE AFTERLIFE: And Other Stories. By John Updike. (Knopf, $24.) Mr. Updike's 11th collection of short stories, unashamedly autobiographical, returns to eastern Pennsylvania, its motherly wives, its minute realities, its occasional moments of grace.

THE ALIENIST. By Caleb Carr. (Random House, $22.) A fast-paced novel set in turn-of-the-century Manhattan about a psychologist and a New York Times reporter on the trail of a serial killer.

ANCESTRAL TRUTHS. By Sara Maitland. (John Macrae/Holt, $22.50.) Ms. Maitland's splendid novel is formally a book-length family reunion at which everyone is peculiar, each in a different way; her prime focus is on a woman trying to remember whether she killed her male traveling companion (she certainly wanted him dead).

THE ANNUNCIATION. By David Plante. (Ticknor & Fields, $21.95.) A widowed art historian, her pregnant daughter and a rootless young editor join forces in Mr. Plante's latest novel. Ostensibly in search of a lost Baroque painting, they find themselves acknowledging more spiritual goals.

AS MAX SAW IT. By Louis Begley. (Knopf, $21.) A short, powerful AIDS novel that, with Jamesian obliquity, never mentions AIDS, and underscores the failure of human beings to acknowledge their responsibility to one another.

BILLY. By Albert French. (Viking, $19.) A racial incident turns into hair-raising tragedy in a classical mode when a black boy kills a white girl in this novel of rural Mississippi in 1937.

THE BINGO PALACE. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $23.) Three decent people look for love on a windblown prairie in this novel whose daily life is enriched by supernatural events and the presence of Indian spirits.

THE BIRD ARTIST. By Howard Norman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.) An adulterous affair and a murder propel this tragic novel of a hamlet in Newfoundland, where everybody knows everybody and the weather is unspeakable.

THE BIRTHDAY BOYS. By Beryl Bainbridge. (Carroll & Graf, $18.95.) A lively, subversive historical novel that penetrates the stoic official heroes of Scott's Antarctic expedition of 1912 to discover the individual silly boys within.

BONE BY BONE: Stories. By Gary Krist. (Harcourt Brace, $19.95.) Without cliche or trickery, Mr. Krist manages in these 13 stories to make ordinary worlds new and disturbing.

THE BOOK OF HRABAL. By Peter Esterhazy. (Northwestern University, $22.50.) A Hungarian novelist ponders his idol, the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, as well as the tangled delights of language, love and jazz.

THE BOOK OF INTIMATE GRAMMAR. By David Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A dark and stunning Israeli novel whose protagonist, a post-Freudian little boy, forestalls the treasons and corruptions of adulthood by ceasing to grow at the age of 11.

CALLED OUT. By A. G. Mojtabai. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.) An abstract, intelligent novel, ostensibly about a jet crash in a small town, that renders the reactions of the witnesses to a random disaster in beautiful, somber prose.

THE CHILDREN IN THE WOODS: New and Selected Stories. By Frederick Busch. (Ticknor & Fields, $21.95.) A culling from 20 years' worth of short fiction that explores the reciprocal failure of parents and children and the curious, almost arbitrary cement of love.

THE CITY BELOW. By James Carroll. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95.) Class and race provide the tension in Mr. Carroll's evocation of Boston over the past few decades, a novel that substantiates an Irish chestnut: every lie is a truth somewhere in time.

CLOSING TIME. By Joseph Heller. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) Yossarian lives! But not forever. The soldiers are old now; gravity and joking are inseparable in this sequel to "Catch-22," and a vision of hell in Manhattan is joined to elegies for Coney Island yesteryears.

CODA. By Thea Astley. (Putnam, $19.95.) In a shopping mall in northern Australia, the spirited, eccentric heroine of Ms. Astley's 13th novel, a kind of female Lear, contemplates her past and articulates her wrath at age and abandonment.

THE COLLECTED STORIES. By Grace Paley. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.50.) Three previous collections are combined in this volume that records, with a bright unsentimental eye and distinctive evocations of New York speech, the striving of Americans (mostly American women) for a better world.

CORELLI'S MANDOLIN. By Louis de Bernieres. (Pantheon, $24.) A high-spirited historical romance about events on a Greek island, mostly during World War II, when Italians and Germans occupy the place and try to control it.

THE CROSSING. By Cormac McCarthy. (Knopf, $23.) In the second language-ensorcelled volume of a projected trilogy, a youthful hero, the custodian of an untamed wolf, crosses from Texas into the inconsolable landscape of Mexico to perform an impossible quest.

CROSSING THE RIVER. By Caryl Phillips. (Knopf, $22.) A novel, covering two and a half centuries, that presents a brilliantly coherent mythified vision of the irreversible African diaspora.

DANCER WITH BRUISED KNEES. By Lynne McFall. (Chronicle, $18.95.) A delightful (honestly!) novel that examines the nature of depression with a straight-shooting voice; its protagonist, Sarah Blight, never succumbs to self-pity even when drunk and blubbering.

DARKTOWN STRUTTERS. By Wesley Brown. (Cane Hill, paper, $11.95.) A vivid, disturbing historical novel that makes freewheeling use of the facts to focus on the personal identities of blacks and whites in 19th-century America.

THE DIVINE CHILD: A Novel of Prenatal Rebellion. By Pascal Bruckner. (Little, Brown, $21.95.) A wonderfully appalling story by a French novelist about a monster in utero.

EATING PAVLOVA. By D. M. Thomas. (Carroll & Graf, $21.) A harrowing, funny, outrageous novel that purports to be a memoir of the last days of Sigmund Freud.

THE END OF THE HUNT. By Thomas Flanagan. (William Abrahams/Dutton, $24.95.) This splendid novel, last of a trilogy, brings Ireland's tragic history down to the civil war of the 1920's. Analogies will be drawn with the present.

THE EYE IN THE DOOR. By Pat Barker. (William Abrahams/Dutton, $20.95.) Ms. Barker's sequel to her 1992 novel, "Regeneration," follows the British psychiatrist William Rivers -- and one of his patients -- further into the horrors of World War I.

THE FAVOURITE. By Meredith Daneman. (Knopf, $19.) Humming with rare humor and moral intelligence, Ms. Daneman's fourth novel is told in alternating time frames -- that of a girl growing up painfully in the 1950's and that of the rueful wife and mother she becomes in the 1970's.

THE FOLLOWING STORY. By Cees Noote boom. (Helen and Kurt Wolff/Harcourt Brace, $14.95.) An insignificant man who has experienced transformation by imagination awaits his turn at death in this "Eurofable" by a Dutch novelist.

FORDING THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. By Dubravka Ugresic. (Northwestern University, paper, $14.95.) A teeming politico-literary satire by a Croatian (written in 1988, before the breakup) in which delegates from various East bloc nations suffer the insults of history.

FROM THE TEETH OF ANGELS. By Jonathan Carroll. (Doubleday, $22.) A stark, cunning novel, a parable about death and the courage to face it, by a literate, witty secular moralist who deserves more attention than he gets.

GOING NATIVE. By Stephen Wright. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A road novel that explodes the conventions of the genre as a weird, dangerous shape-shifting protagonist remakes his identity on the way to California.

THE GOOD HUSBAND. By Gail Godwin. (Bal lantine, $22.95.) Magda Danvers, the brilliant scholar at the center of Ms. Godwin's novel, is dying of cancer. To her devoted husband and a married couple who have recently suffered their own loss, her legacy is a sometimes painful consideration of how life ought to be lived.

THE GRANDMOTHER'S TALE: And Selected Stories. By R. K. Narayan. (Viking, $24.95.) The title story (1992) and a selection of old favorites show the humanism that makes Mr. Narayan's most poignant stories comedies of suffering rather than tragedies of laughter.

HENRY AND CLARA. By Thomas Mallon. (Ticknor & Fields, $22.95.) A historical novel about the young couple who shared the Presidential box with the Lincolns at Ford's Theater on the evening of Good Friday, 1865.

HIMMELFARB. By Michael Kruger. (Braziller, $18.50.) An unsettling first-person novel, the confession of an 80-year-old German ethnologist whose reputation depends entirely on research he appropriated from a Jew from 1939 to 1941.

HOUSE OF SPLENDID ISOLATION. By Edna O'Brien. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21.) Ms. O'Brien's novel anatomizes the human aspects of recent Irish history, exploring the relationship of an Irish Republican Army terrorist and the elderly Irish woman who becomes his hostage.

HOUSE WORK. By Kristina McGrath. (Bridge Works, $19.95.) In this moving and lyrical first novel, a Pittsburgh housewife tries to save herself and her family through her devoted domesticity.

IN THE TENNESSEE COUNTRY. By Peter Taylor. (Knopf, $21.) In mellow, elegant prose, this fine novel follows the quest of an academic hustler and failed artist to pin down a cousin who escaped from history a generation after the Civil War.

KISS OF THE WOLF. By Jim Shepard. (Harcourt Brace, $21.95.) A hit-and-run accident lies at the center of this terror-filled novel set in an Italian Catholic community in Connecticut.

LAST GO ROUND. By Ken Kesey with Ken Babbs. (Viking, $21.95.) It's circa 1911 in this ruc tious neo-dime western, a novel that dares to be as phony as the real thing, its prairie-flat characters ornamented with episodic plot, inflated atmosphere and impossible prowess.

THE LAST KNOWN RESIDENCE OF MICKEY ACUNA. By Dagoberto Gilb. (Grove, $21.) Set in El Paso, the border town to end all border towns, Mr. Gilb's first novel is a bleak fable of a low-rent outlaw on the lam from someone who may be himself.

LIFE ESTATES. By Shelby Hearon. (Knopf, $22.) In Ms. Hearon's 13th novel, two women who have been friends since childhood discover that widowhood derails the seemingly parallel courses of their lives.

LOUISIANA POWER & LIGHT. By John Dufresne. (Norton, $22.) Mr. Dufresne's first novel, replete with funny lines and plot twists that always lead somewhere, concerns an orphan's efforts to escape a family curse. Lots of luck, orphan!

MAKE ME WORK. By Ralph Lombreglia. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.) Short stories that fizz with humor and hipness explore the lives of happy underachievers and the women patiently waiting for them to grow up.

MARBLE SKIN. By Slavenka Drakulic. (Norton, $20.) A finely wrought novel that explores the relationship between a mother and daughter with such a simple but volatile mixture of revulsion, eroticism and intimacy that by the novel's end the reader knows an entire array of women through this single pair.

THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG. By J. M. Coetzee. (Viking, $21.95.) The hero of Mr. Coetzee's grimmest novel yet is Dostoyevsky himself, trapped in generational and political clashes, trying to scrape meaning from the death of a son.

MERRY MEN. By Carolyn Chute. (Harcourt Brace, $24.95.) In her third rendition of the tar-paper town portrayed in "The Beans of Egypt, Maine," Ms. Chute adds blue bloods to her characters and continues to mix choppy concreteness with idiosyncratic elegance in her prose.

MESHUGAH. By Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) The third (so far) posthumously published novel by Singer is set in the early 1950's; its characters, despite their high spirits and unstoppable gab, are haunted by stories that can't be forgotten and can't be told.

MILLROY THE MAGICIAN. By Paul Theroux. (Random House, $24.) Mr. Theroux's 20th work of fiction is a dark satire of our national obsession with trim bodies and religious television, embodied in a single eccentric prestidigitator.

THE MORTICIAN'S APPRENTICE. By Rick DeMarinis. (Norton, $21.) A comic coming-of-age novel, set in mid-1950's California, in which the hero's marriage prospects could involve some unsavory fringe benefits.

MOSES SUPPOSES. By Ellen Currie. (Simon & Schuster, $20.) A distinguished first collection of Ms. Currie's short stories, new and old; in relationships gone wrong, in everyday objects, she discerns hints of large meanings and glimmers of submerged mysteries.

MR. VERTIGO. By Paul Auster. (Viking, $21.95.) A badly abused 9-year-old boy is taught to fly by a mysterious Master Yehudi in this fanciful novel of an education for death or for art, controlled by the metaphorical meanings of flight.

MY GOLDEN TRADES. By Ivan Klima. (Scribners, $22.) Stories placed in Czechoslovakia during the decay of Communist rule; the hero-narrator, an unpolitical man of many occupations (the "trades" of the title), has a keen sense of the satisfactions of everyday life.

NONE TO ACCOMPANY ME. By Nadine Gordimer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) Ms. Gordimer's 11th novel, whose central figure is a progressive white woman in the new South Africa, shows again that the true focus of social concern is on the particular lives of individuals.

NORTHERN BORDERS. By Howard Frank Mosher. (Doubleday, $22.95.) An old-fashioned coming-of-age novel, set in northern Vermont from the late 1940's onward.

ONE SWEET QUARREL. By Deirdre McNamer. (HarperCollins, $22.) A historical novel that meanders back and forth in time, working its way toward the day in 1923 when Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion of the world, came to the tiny town of Shelby, Mont., to fight a local hero for the title.

ONE TRUE THING. By Anna Quindlen. (Random House, $22.) This second novel by a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times concerns a talented journalist, the lingering death of her mother and the emotional changes and reflections forced upon her.

OPAL ON DRY GROUND. By Sandra Scofield. (Villard, $20.) A gentle, compassionate novel about a west Texas woman who's trying, without much success, to perfect the role of family matriarch.

PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA. By Roddy Doyle. (Viking, $20.95.) This luminously written Irish novel, winner of the 1993 Booker Prize in Britain, is about the life force incarnate in its narrator, an unforgettable 10-year-old boy in the brilliantly realized world of 1960's Dublin.

THE PALACE THIEF. By Ethan Canin. (Random House, $21.) Four long stories in which four men, of various ages and circumstances, inspect their past lives in hopes of future redemption.

THE PARTISAN. By Benjamin Cheever. (Atheneum, $21.) Families are made, not born, in Mr. Cheever's funny, sad second novel, whose college-boyish hero is pervasively and fortuitously intruded upon by a preposterously handsome and sophisticated writer.

THE PATRON SAINT OF UNMARRIED WOMEN. By Karl Ackerman. (St. Martin's, $20.95.) A comic first novel in which an opera-loving jock tries to adjust to life on his own -- even as he uses all his wiles to effect a reconciliation with the woman of his dreams.

A PLAGUE OF DREAMERS: Three Novellas. By Steve Stern. (Scribners, $20.) Fables spiced with magic realism -- and the magic of sheer survival -- set in Mr. Stern's familiar territory, the history-defying Jewish community called the Pinch, a backwater Memphis version of the Pale.

POLITICALLY CORRECT BEDTIME STORIES. By James Finn Garner. (Macmillan, $8.95.) Thirteen previously unenlightened fairy tales, hilariously purged of their racist, sexist and monocultural bias.

PROFANE FRIENDSHIP. By Harold Brodkey. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) The story line of Mr. Brodkey's second novel is strong and simple, but the story is far less the point than is the fact that Mr. Brodkey's principals become, as figures in good fiction always do, a part of our own active memory.

QUICKSAND. By Junichiro Tanizaki. (Knopf, $22.) A novel about a woman who casts such a spell on her lesbian lover and the lover's husband that they long to die for her, by a writer whose constant themes were self-destructive sexuality and the double image of woman as goddess and demon; first published in Japan in 1928-30.

RARE & ENDANGERED SPECIES: A Novella & Stories. By Richard Bausch. (Seymour Lawrence/Houghton Mifflin, $22.95.) Mr. Bausch's third fiction collection faithfully explores the territory he knows best: long marriages, old grudges, unforgotten injuries.

THE REPUBLIC OF WHORES: A Fragment From the Time of the Cults. By Josef Skvorecky. (Ecco, $21.) Published in Czech in 1971, this keen comic novel concerns a Warsaw Pact tank commander and his men, who hate their allies far more than their prospective American enemies.

THE RIFLES. By William T. Vollmann. (Viking, $22.95.) The hyperactive dream logic of this third book in a projected meganovel of North America conflates Franklin's fatal Arctic expedition of 1845 with a novelist's adventures in 1989.

THE RUSSIAN GIRL. By Kingsley Amis. (Viking, $22.95.) Sex, booze and the intrigues of Russian poets drive the mordant plot of Mr. Amis's latest novel, which is set in contemporary London.

SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND. By Dennis McFarland. (Houghton Mifflin, $21.95.) A deft, affecting novel whose aging protagonist retires in the vain hope that he can plan the outcome of life and decline slowly, affably toward its end.

SECOND NATURE. By Alice Hoffman. (Putnam, $22.95.) In Ms. Hoffman's 10th novel, a young man raised by wolves is transformed, thanks to the unlikely ministrations of a single mother with more than enough problems of her own, from an object of curiosity to a touchstone of human values.

SELECTED STORIES. By Adolfo Bioy Casares. (New Directions, $21.95.) An appealing, provocative assortment of stories, many about men who share a hopeful and befuddling machismo, from the Argentine collaborator and protege of Jorge Luis Borges.

SHEAR. By Tim Parks. (Grove, $21.) An eerie, engrossing suspense novel about responsibility; its hero, a smug geological consultant, tragically complicates his life through sexual adventure.

SHELTER. By Jayne Anne Phillips. (Seymour Lawrence/Houghton Mifflin, $21.95.) Ms. Phillips's second novel blends regionalism and symbolism in a spiritually charged parable of innocence too young betrayed in a backwoods summer camp for girls in 1963.

SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. By David Gut erson. (Harcourt Brace, $21.95.) A handsomely constructed, densely packed first novel whose characters are those who suffered and those who profited from the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, called upon by a criminal trial to act decently later on.

A SON OF THE CIRCUS. By John Irving. (Random House, $25.) Three rings could hardly contain all the plots and subplots that are juggled in Mr. Irving's latest novel, which draws its characters from the many intersecting worlds of Bombay, India.

SOULS RAISED FROM THE DEAD. By Doris Betts. (Knopf, $23.) The main event in Ms. Betts's first novel in 13 years is the death of a child; out of it is spun a deep understanding of grief, of the pungency of Southern small-town life and of the inevitable injuries reality inflicts.

THE STONE DIARIES. By Carol Shields. (Viking, $21.95.) A panorama of 20th-century life is revealed in a diary-shaped novel that probes the most delicate layers of consciousness in tracing one woman's existence from birth to grave.

STONES FROM THE RIVER. By Ursula Hegi. (Poseidon, $23.) Resignation is the highest virtue in this historical novel about small-town Germany from 1915 to 1952; its moral center is Trudi, a clever dwarf with a tenacious memory.

THE STORIES OF STEPHEN DIXON. By Stephen Dixon. (Holt, $25.) Selected from 30 years of Mr. Dixon's work, these stories play unsettling variations on several grand themes: relations between the sexes, the plight of the individual in a hostile society, the instability of truth.

A STRANGER IN THIS WORLD. By Kevin Canty. (Doubleday, $20.) A debut collection of sharp, smart short stories about people caught at the intersection between what they know they should do and what they can't help doing.

THE SUMMER HOUSE: A Trilogy. By Alice Thomas Ellis. (Penguin, paper, $9.95.) Edgy, bright, subversive fictions about women's inner lives and experiences, each narrated by an Englishwoman whose existence is under revision.

SUNDAY'S CHILDREN. By Ingmar Bergman. (Arcade, $16.95.) In his second autobiographical novel, the Swedish director revisits childhood in beautifully realized set pieces through which the psychological drama is developed.

TAFT. By Ann Patchett. (Richard Todd/ Houghton Mifflin, $21.95.) This generous novel concerns abandonment, dislocation and the recovery of community in a Memphis bar whose owner is a surrogate parent to two displaced teen-agers.

TEN TALES TALL & TRUE. By Alasdair Gray. (Harcourt Brace, $19.95.) Stories of zany boldness, by a weirdly talented multimedia artist, that dramatize symbioses of oppression between willing victims and victimizers.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING. By Christopher Buckley. (Random House, $22.) A comic novel that succeeds in enlisting the reader on the side of the devils, represented by an implausible hero: Nick Naylor, an energetic, unscrupulous lobbyist for the cigarette industry.

THESE SAME LONG BONES. By Gwendolyn M. Parker. (Houghton Mifflin, $21.95.) With an unusual combination of lush metaphor and narrative restraint, this first novel spins a tale of race and power as a black businessman struggles to transcend his daughter's death.

THE TIME: NIGHT. By Ludmilla Petrushev skaya. (Pantheon, $20.) An unflinching stream-of-consciousness novel in which a destitute Russian poet bemoans the state of her family and her nation.

THE TRACK OF REAL DESIRES. By Beverly Lowry. (Knopf, $21.) At the center of this comic, spirited novel are a terrific dinner party and a story of loss, malice, ruin, envy and, finally, trust.

UNDER THE FROG: A Black Comedy. By Tibor Fischer. (New Press, $17.) An energetic, naughty novel of Hungary behind the Iron Curtain, rendered in wild scenarios (like streaking the Interior Ministry), ending with the 1956 rising.

VARIOUS ANTIDOTES: Stories. By Joanna Scott. (Holt, $20.) The obsessive characters in Ms. Scott's first collection move through several centuries in the history of science, but all seem to feel equally the power of dreams.

THE WATERWORKS. By E. L. Doctorow. (Random House, $23.) An intellectual ripping yarn in which a grim, smoke-stained New York City of 1871 is the principal character; the novel's poetic flow of myth gracefully sustains its burden of ideas, of which there are plenty.

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK I AM: (A Confabulation). By Eric Kraft. (Crown, $22.) The latest novel in the continuing saga of Peter Leroy proposes an imaginary adult life for the imaginary sister of Peter's imaginary boyhood friend.

WHAT I LIVED FOR. By Joyce Carol Oates. (William Abrahams/Dutton, $23.95.) Ms. Oates shrewdly dissects the national myths of manhood and success in a novel whose easily confused hero understands less than the reader does of what passes through his own mind.

WHAT IS TOLD. By Askold Melnyczuk. (Faber & Faber, $21.95.) In a narrative presided over by presences from the spirit world, this genially pessimistic first novel follows the fortunes of three generations of cosmopolitan Ukrainian-Americans from places like Paris and Berchtesgaden to places like Free Fall, N.J.

WHITE MAN'S GRAVE. By Richard Dooling. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) Revitalizing the traditional comic novel of colonialism, Mr. Dooling contrasts the Sierra Leone bush with suburban Indiana, home of a Peace Corps volunteer who has gone missing in Africa.

WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL? By Lorrie Moore. (Knopf, $20.) A sad, witty, disillusioned fairy tale whose heroine, approaching 40, recalls the illusion of limitless possibility she felt when she was actually young.

WITHOUT A HERO: Stories. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $21.95.) Mr. Boyle's unaverted gaze, caustic sensibility and attraction to everything queasy are all evident in his fourth collection of short stories.

History

AFRICAN AMERICANS AT MARS BLUFF, SOUTH CAROLINA. By Amelia Wallace Vernon. (Louisiana State University, $29.95.) What was a community of black rice growers doing 60 miles from the sea in the heart of cotton country? This important and surprising book transcends the domain of local history.

BOND OF IRON: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge. By Charles B. Dew. (Norton, $27.50.) A historian of the American South studies an industrialist and the black labor force he and his heirs employed for a half-century in antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction Virginia.

THE CIVILIZATION OF EUROPE IN THE RENAISSANCE. By John Hale. (Atheneum, $35.) On the canvas of a whole continent, a distinguished historian portrays the expanding, reforming, self-consciously new Europe that led to where we live now.

THE COLD WAR: A History. By Martin Walker. (John Macrae/Holt, $30.) A veteran British journalist offers a broad and lively summary of 50 years of history.

D-DAY, JUNE 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. By Stephen E. Ambrose. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Drawing on 1,200 oral histories of veterans, Mr. Ambrose evokes the daring and the horror of individual ordeals played out along the bloody beaches of the Calvados coastline of Normandy.

DIPLOMACY. By Henry Kissinger. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) Mr. Kissinger's "great man" history of diplomacy focuses on individuals, not trends or forces, and shows his reverence for cool thinkers who employ both power and analysis.

FRAUEN: German Women Recall the Third Reich. By Alison Owings. (Rutgers University, $24.95.) Ms. Owings hoped, by interviewing German women 70 and older, to find they had been nobler than German men in the Nazi era. They weren't, but the excursion is fascinating.

GAY NEW YORK: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. By George Chauncey. (Basic Books, $25.) A historian's enormously informative study of 50 years during which a flourishing gay culture carved out public and private space for itself.

A HISTORY OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT. By Mark Tessler. (Indiana University, cloth, $57.50; paper, $27.50.) A thoughtful and resolutely fair-minded history of a dispute in which there has never been enough thoughtfulness and fair-mindedness.

IN EUROPE'S NAME: Germany and the Divided Continent. By Timothy Garton Ash. (Random House, $27.50.) This sober major study in recent international history examines West Germany's conciliatory Ostpolitik: did it help or hinder the collapse of Communism? A hard question, approached with respect for its ambiguity.

LOCAL PEOPLE: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. By John Dittmer. (University of Illinois, $29.95.) A historian looks at the civil rights movement of the 1960's from below, giving us a gripping account of courageous individuals facing violence and murder in Mississippi.

THE MASSACRE AT EL MOZOTE: A Parable of the Cold War. By Mark Danner. (Vintage, paper, $12.) A journalist recounts a 1981 atrocity in El Salvador and the ways in which the story got distorted and covered up in both El Salvador and the United States.

A NEW WORLD: An Epic of Colonial America From the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec. By Arthur Quinn. (Faber & Faber, $35.) A Hobbesian history in which the hopes of utopian colonists are crushed by man and nature.

OF LONG MEMORY: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. By Adam Nossiter. (Addison-Wesley, $22.) Mr. Nossiter has written a dual portrait of a civil rights leader and the man who murdered him, as well as a narrative of the decades-long effort to force the state of Mississippi to confront its moral and legal duties.

PAUL REVERE'S RIDE. By David Hackett Fischer. (Oxford University, $27.50.) No rehash of Longfellow but a historian's careful account of the ride and the surrounding events, emphasizing the broad-based, communal nature of the Revolutionary movement in New England.

THE RAPE OF EUROPA: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. By Lynn H. Nicholas. (Knopf, $27.50.) A hair-raising account of the Nazis' megalomaniac looting of Europe's artistic treasures, the perils undergone by the artworks themselves, and the Allies' strivings to find the stuff, save it and bring it back.

RUSSIA UNDER THE BOLSHEVIK REGIME. By Richard Pipes. (Knopf, $35.) This painstaking, literate final volume of a trilogy begun 20 years ago reflects its author's long involvement with Soviet policy and scholarship and, like its predecessors, does not withhold moral judgment.

SAME-SEX UNIONS IN PREMODERN EUROPE. By John Boswell. (Villard, $25.) A Yale historian's learned, knotty study of male love (whose exact nature isn't clear) and the ceremonies that he conjectures were used to solemnize it from the 11th to 16th centuries.

SISTERS OF FORTUNE. By Nancy Coffey Heffernan and Ann Page Stecker. (University Press of New England, cloth, $40; paper, $15.95.) The letters of three New Hampshire girls over 11 years to their father, who left them for the gold of California in 1850, testify to the status of women and the dominance of hope over experience.

THE SOVIET TRAGEDY: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991. By Martin Malia. (Free Press, $24.95.) Not a work of research but of interpretation, this study aims to reassert the primacy of ideology and politics over social and economic forces in explaining what happened.

SOWING THE SEEDS OF DEMOCRACY IN CHINA: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era. By Merle Goldman. (Harvard University, $39.95.) A Western expert on China's intellectual dissidents turns to the latest decade and the misfortunes of the educated democratic elite.

SPECIAL TASKS: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster. By Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoly Sudoplatov with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A valuable book about Stalin's terror apparatus by a man who served it, written with the help of his son and two journalists.

STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO. By James Goodman. (Pantheon, $27.50.) A well-written and kaleidoscopic account of the 1931 Alabama rape case that grew to become a symbol of the oppression faced by black Americans in a region where white supremacy was an uncontested fact of life.

TRANSFORMING WOMEN'S WORK: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution. By Thomas Dublin. (Cornell University, $35.) This valuable addition to the scholar's shelf provides much-needed detail on women and work, and the independence work brought women, in 19th-century industrial America.

THE UNQUIET GHOST: Russians Remember Stalin. By Adam Hochschild. (Viking, $22.95.) Through interviews with survivors of the gulag, prison camp guards and the children of both, the author effectively places Stalinism in a modern context.

THE VIRGINIA ADVENTURE. Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey. By Ivor Noel Hume. (Knopf, $35.) With careful handling, the frail remains of the earliest colonial past yield to archeologists truths not recoverable from written sources (including a few unsuspected crimes and blunders).

THE WAGES OF GUILT: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. By Ian Buruma. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) An examination, by an impressively informed and empathetic journalist, of the ways in which the cataclysms of our century have shaped national identity.

WAR IN ITALY, 1943-1945: A Brutal Story. By Richard Lamb. (St. Martin's, $23.95.) The painful story of Italy after the fall of Mussolini, a land characterized for two years by enslavement, betrayal and mass murder, ravaged by Fascist thugs, the Germans and the Allied armies.

WHEN CHINA RULED THE SEAS: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433. By Louise Levathes. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) The historical lacuna filled by this meticulously researched book is the story of the Chinese expeditions west across the Indian Ocean, led by the imperial eunuch Zheng He.

WOMEN'S WORK. The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. By Elizabeth Wayland Barber. (Norton, $23.) A fascinating history and prehistory of the making of textiles, a craft, exclusive to women (including queens and goddesses), that preceded and made possible civilization itself.

Medicine & Psychology

THE COMING PLAGUE: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. By Laurie Garrett. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A disturbing, meticulously researched medical alarm, by a Newsday reporter, about the menace of fast-spreading, terrifying new diseases and genetically remodeled old ones.

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SIGMUND FREUD AND SANDOR FERENCZI: Volume 1, 1908-1914. Edited by Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch under the supervision of Andre Haynal. (Belknap/Harvard University, $39.95.) These letters between the commanding Freud and an influential, mercurial disciple promise a major contribution to the exploration of psychoanalysis in the making.

THE HOT ZONE. By Richard Preston. (Random House, $23.) A dramatic reconstruction of what happened when Ebola virus broke out in a monkey quarantine in a commuter town near Washington, threatening to spark an epidemic.

HOW WE DIE: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter. By Sherwin B. Nuland. (Knopf, $24.) The author, a physician, surgeon and teacher for 35 years, offers a wise, humane and cultivated examination of what happens to people when they die, omitting none of the clinical detail. Winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction.

KAREN HORNEY: A Psychoanalyst's Search for Self-Understanding. By Bernard J. Paris. (Yale University, $30.) Avoiding the hagiographic impulse, the founder of the International Karen Horney Society gives a valuable and vivid portrait of an early psychoanalyst that reveals her powers of exploration and the connection between her ideas and her inner world.

LISTENING. By Hannah Merker. (HarperCollins, $20.) A prolonged lyrical meditation, wise and instructive, on the importance of sound in the lives of the creatures of this planet, by a writer, editor and former librarian who lost most of her hearing when she was 39 years old.

LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History. By Sheila M. Rothman. (Basic Books, $25.) A social history of tuberculosis using the "illness narratives" of patients to chart a disease from the unscientific perspective of the patients.

MOTHERLESS DAUGHTERS: The Legacy of Loss. By Hope Edelman. (Addison-Wesley, $23.) In this moving and valuable treatment of a neglected subject, Ms. Edelman mingles her own denial and anger and yearning at the death of her mother with the stories of nearly 200 women who have lost theirs.

MY OWN COUNTRY: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS. By Abraham Verghese. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) An eloquent personal memoir of a foreign-born doctor's experience in Tennessee, where he arrived just in time to encounter and treat men returning home with the AIDS they caught in the big city.

9 HIGHLAND ROAD. By Michael Winerip. (Pantheon, $25.) An unobtrusive, nonjudgmental illumination of two years in the lives of the mentally ill in a group home on Long Island, by a reporter for The New York Times.

ON FLIRTATION. By Adam Phillips. (Harvard University, $19.95.) This collection of essays, lectures and book reviews captures the thoughts of a lucid psychoanalyst, contemplating what he likes and what he misses in Freudian theory.

RAISING THE DEAD. By Richard Selzer. (Whittle Books/Viking, $17.50.) The author, a former surgeon unusually sensitive to the contingency of life, describes his own near-death experience, an ordeal in which the only comfort was his survival.

REMEMBERING SATAN. By Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $22.) This story about the perils of recovered memory concerns a man who, charged by his daughters with sexual abuse, proceeded to summon up what he assumed were blocked memories of the events.

SEX IN AMERICA: A Definitive Survey. By Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, Edward O. Laumann and Gina Kolata. (Little, Brown, $22.95.) A compact, less statistically demanding summary of the findings of "The Social Organization of Sexuality," a survey of American sexual practices.

THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF SEXUALITY: Sexual Practices in the United States. By Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael and Stuart Michaels. (University of Chicago, $49.95.) The most important survey of American sexual behavior since Kinsey's reports of 1948 and 1953.

SUGGESTIONS OF ABUSE: True and False Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma. By Michael D. Yapko. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) A simple explanation from an expert on hypnosis about why recovered memories, dredged up with the help of abuse therapists, are so unreliable.

SURGERY: An Illustrated History. By Ira M. Rutkow. (Mosby-Year Book/Norman Publishing, $99.) A large, attractive volume by a surgeon, chronicling the art of wounding to heal from prehistory to the present, with 368 handsome (and non-sick-making) illustrations.

TRAIN GO SORRY: Inside a Deaf World. By Leah Hager Cohen. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95.) Ms. Cohen's personal journey through a school for the deaf (she hears normally, but grew up there because her father is its superintendent) is also an introduction to an exceptional society that is still deciding how it should live.

UNCHAINED MEMORIES: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found. By Lenore Terr. (Basic Books, $22.) A psychiatrist relays tales of lost memories, including that of a woman who recovered the memory of her father murdering her childhood friend 20 years before.

Poetry

AND THE STARS WERE SHINING. By John Ashbery. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) Mr. Ashbery's 16th poetry collection offers 58 shining new lyrics, supple, skeptical, conscious of mortality but never oppressed by gloom.

BREAKDOWN LANE: Poems. By Robert Phillips. (Johns Hopkins University, cloth, $30; paper, $12.95.) Mr. Phillips is an eloquent poet of rancor and gall, spleen-ridden, a master of despair, with a healthy sense of humor and self-disregard.

COLLECTED POEMS. By Thom Gunn. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) The classical clarity of finely honed meter and incisive rhymes marks the work of this British poet who has lived in this country for 40 years. He brings Augustan assurance to demotic, often gay, experience.

CROSSROADS. By David R. Slavitt. (Louisiana State University, cloth, $15.95; paper, $8.95.) Perhaps best known for his verse translations of Latin poetry, Mr. Slavitt is an adept formal poet with a sharp eye for the hard and fine lives of ordinary people. He is also a wicked satirist and can be wildly funny.

EARTHLY MEASURES. By Edward Hirsch. (Knopf, $20.) In our secular time it comes as a jolt when a poet makes it clear the search for God comes first. These are poems of immense wonder, rigor and eloquence, filled with generosity and heartbreaking longing.

GARBAGE. By A. R. Ammons. (Norton, $17.95.) A long poem of rueful grandeur and splendid oddity in which what's left over is transmuted; winner of last year's National Book Award.

HINGE & SIGN: Poems, 1968-1993. By Heather McHugh. (Wesleyan University/University Press of New England, cloth, $35; paper, $14.95.) A retrospective gathering of old and new work by a poet who is our laureate of physical love, whose poems about sex are poems of poetic vocation.

OUT OF DANGER. By James Fenton. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) This British poet's works are direct, artless and entertaining. This ragbag of love songs and political ballads shows that Mr. Fenton's poetry lives in discord, and he has a rough compassion for the lies of language.

A SILENCE OPENS. By Amy Clampitt. (Knopf, $20.) Amy Clampitt, who died this year, always delivered the sheer richness of the observed world, but for all her sometimes dizzily elevated language she was a poet of history and politics, and these poems are the shrewdest she wrote.

WHEN TIME FOLDS UP. By Kathleen Fraser. (Chax Press, paper, $11.) One of the most distinguished poetic nonconformists in the country uses a collage-like syntax and playful "errors" to create poems that directly reflect how we think. Her poems are playful, sometimes astonishing, always enormously stimulating.

Politics & Current Affairs

THE AGENDA: Inside the Clinton White House. By Bob Woodward. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) In this journalist's account of the tortured twists and turns in the making of the Clinton economic plan, the President's problems mostly stem from his unwillingness to disagree with anyone.

ALL'S FAIR: Love, War, and Running for President. By Mary Matalin and James Carville with Peter Knobler. (Random House and Simon & Schuster, $24.) They were in love. She was political director of the Bush campaign in 1992. He was manager of Bill Clinton's. This is their story. Hepburn and Tracy were never such fun.

ARROGANT CAPITAL: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics. By Kevin Phillips. (Little, Brown, $22.95.) A prescient analyst of election trends makes a convincing case that voters see Washington as the enemy because they can't crack the interlock between interest-group power and the political system.

BARBARA BUSH: A Memoir. By Barbara Bush. (Lisa Drew/Scribners, $25.) This swan of a First Lady, one of the most popular in modern history, gives the reader a tour through her life story and the parallel universe of the political spouse, where the watchword is relentless loyalty.

THE BELL CURVE: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. By Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. (Free Press, $30.) The evidence the authors see indicates to them that society is layered in rough accordance with I.Q. and that I.Q. is largely heritable, findings they believe society needs to take note of.

BITTER WINDS: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag. By Harry Wu and Carolyn Wakeman. (Robert L. Bernstein/Wiley, $22.95.) Mr. Wu's memoir of 19 years in labor camps is grimly familiar as to abuse and deprivation but grotesque and surreal in its account of acting out each new political rectification campaign right in the heart of the prison system.

BLOOD AND BELONGING: Journeys Into the New Nationalism. By Michael Ignatieff. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21.) The author travels to such places as Croatia, Kurdistan and Northern Ireland to offer vivid vignettes of contemporary nationalists and to issue somber warnings about their threat to liberal cosmopolitanism.

BREAKUP: The Coming End of Canada and the Stakes for America. By Lansing Lamont. (Norton, $25.) An admonitory speculation by a well-informed American journalist: if Quebec secedes, Canada will disintegrate; American involvement will be unavoidable and embarrassing.

CERTAIN TRUMPETS: The Call of Leaders. By Garry Wills. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A popular historian and journalist seeks to analyze leadership, and finds that the leader and the led must be mutually indebted and must have the same goal.

CHILDREN FIRST: What Our Society Must Do -- and Is Not Doing -- for Our Children Today. By Penelope Leach. (Knopf, $22.) No amount of advice to parents suffices, an outstanding advice giver concludes; she proposes social programs that would cost plenty, in money and in effort.

CHINA WAKES: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. (Times Books/Random House, $25.) Two correspondents for The Times report from a nation whose ruling classes, having chucked Communism, seem to run on sheer meanness.

CITY ON A HILL: Testing the American Dream at City College. By James Traub. (William Patrick/Addison-Wesley, $25.) The transformative mission of a public institution that tried to do its duty first by elitism, later by inclusion.

CIVIL WARS: From L.A. to Bosnia. By Hans Magnus Enzensberger. (New Press, $18.) Three cheerless essays about nihilistic violence, recurrent chaos and the debate in Germany over immigration and asylum, by a leading German poet, dramatist and philosopher.

THE CONFIRMATION MESS: Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process. By Stephen L. Carter. (Basic Books, $21.) A law professor argues cogently that the Federal confirmation process has become a monster, grotesquely unfair to nominees of both right and left.

CONFRONTING AUTHORITY: Reflections of an Ardent Protester. By Derrick Bell. (Beacon, $20.) A former professor at Harvard Law School has harsh words for the institution and for legal education in general.

DEAD RIGHT. By David Frum. (New Republic/Basic Books, $23.) A fierce conservative chides his fellows, including the Reaganites, for abandoning the true economic doctrine in favor of rhetoric about social values and concessions to the recipients of Government entitlements.

DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future. By Richard Bernstein. (Knopf, $25.) The author, a cultural correspondent for The New York Times, has written a study of cultural panic, in which demands for diversity produce uniformity and incorrect speech is summarily punished.

DOGMATIC WISDOM: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America. By Russell Jacoby. (Doubleday, $29.95.) A punchy and effective effort at taking the tired culture wars onto different ground, noting, among other things, that in most colleges the question of which books are essential to a liberal education is moot: very little literature, history or philosophy is taught.

DREAM CITY: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. By Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) The sad story of the rise and fall of Marion Barry, and the sadder tale of how the once placid, middle-class city of Washington has been allowed to descend into addiction and despair.

THE HALDEMAN DIARIES: Inside the Nixon White House. By H. R. Haldeman. (Putnam, $27.50.) In this posthumously published diary of his White House years, Richard M. Nixon's chief of staff exposes the petty side of the P (as he calls his boss) and his men more thoroughly than ever before.

THE HEART THAT BLEEDS: Latin America Now. By Alma Guillermoprieto. (Knopf, $24.) An experienced reporter's essays on Latin American realities as they are lived and felt as the region copes with urbanization and market economics.

THE HOMELESS. By Christopher Jencks. (Harvard University, $17.95.) Mr. Jencks's careful review of the large body of accumulated research on the homeless contradicts the received wisdom of both liberals and conservatives; he proposes sensible discussion and incremental remedies.

I AM ROE: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice. By Norma McCorvey with Andy Meisler. (HarperCollins, $23.) Norma McCorvey's powerful account of her difficult journey from private woman to public symbol underscores the gulf between myth and reality in American politics.

IMPERIUM. By Ryszard Kapuscinski. (Knopf, $24.) Poland's pre-eminent foreign correspondent looks close to home and loses his detachment, rendering Russia and its inhabitants as ignorant, joyless, servile and unlikely to come to any good.

THE IMPOSSIBLE COUNTRY: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia. By Brian Hall. (Godine, $23.95.) This intelligent, witty travel account, reporting on a journey taken in 1991, is a guide to the minds of the peoples of what was once Yugoslavia, and so a manual of xenophobia.

LEADING WITH MY HEART. By Virginia Kelley with James Morgan. (Simon & Schuster, $22.50.) This intimate, posthumously published memoir throbs with the vitality of its gregarious, gambling, hard-drinking author, who was also the President's mother.

LIBERTY AND SEXUALITY: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. By David J. Garrow. (Lisa Drew/Macmillan, $28.) A monumental, insightful account of the profound transformation in American attitudes about sexuality that culminated in the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion a constitutional right.

LIVING A POLITICAL LIFE. By Madeleine Kunin. (Knopf, $25.) Ms. Kunin tells how she came to be a three-term Governor of Vermont and develops the thesis that a "woman's political culture," with the power to transform politics benignly, has arisen and is growing in this country.

MANDATE OF HEAVEN: A New Generation of Entrepreneurs, Dissidents, Bohemians, and Technocrats Lays Claim to China's Future. By Orville Schell. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Graceful analysis and unobtrusive reporting of developments since the Tiananmen Square massacre five years ago.

ON THE EDGE: The Clinton Presidency. By Elizabeth Drew. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) Through interviews with the White House staff, Ms. Drew has put together a devastating picture of bumbling incompetence.

A PLACE AT THE TABLE: The Gay Individual in American Society. By Bruce Bawer. (Poseidon, $21.) A sharply argued polemic by a conservative homosexual, full of autobiographical detail and debates the author has had with himself and his critics.

THE RAGE OF A PRIVILEGED CLASS. By Ellis Cose. (HarperCollins, $20.) The class in question is the black middle class, and Mr. Cose's account leaves little doubt that the people who belong to it are daily humiliated by white people, and don't like it a bit.

REBELLIONS, PERVERSITIES, AND MAIN EVENTS. By Murray Kempton. (Times Books/ Random House, $27.50.) Pieces long and short by a journalist whose abiding fidelity to the radical impulse and the baroque style has made him as inimitable as he is indispensable.

SARAJEVO: A War Journal. By Zlatko Diz darevic. (Fromm, $19.95.) A lament for Bosnia and for civilization, by a newspaper editor who celebrates the endurance and heroism of ordinary people caught in an insane conflict.

SCHOOLGIRLS: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap. By Peggy Orenstein in association with the American Association of University Women. (Doubleday, $23.50.) Using the association's research, Ms. Orenstein, a skilled reporter, talked to real young women and shows them losing confidence as they mature.

STANDING FIRM: A Vice-Presidential Memoir. By Dan Quayle. (HarperCollins/Zondervan, $25.) In this account of his life and times, the former Vice President and apparent 1996 candidate takes on his potential rivals, developing a new style in campaign books: the political memoir as intraparty cluster bomb.

STRANGE JUSTICE: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. By Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95.) A fine, rational work providing chapter and verse about how the religious right helped secure the nomination of Clarence Thomas.

THE STRUGGLE FOR RUSSIA. By Boris Yeltsin. (Belka Publishing/Times Books/Random House, $25.) Russia's first democratically elected leader shows himself more thoughtful, more observant, more sensitive to nuances of other people's behavior than at first he appeared.

WASHINGTON THROUGH A PURPLE VEIL: Memoirs of a Southern Woman. By Lindy Boggs with Katherine Hatch. (Harcourt Brace, $24.95.) An engrossing narrative of the life of a former Congresswoman, whose large share of family tragedy has been offset by the comfort and power of her big, gregarious family.

WHO WE ARE: A Portrait of America Based on the Latest U.S. Census. By Sam Roberts. (Times Books/Random House, $18.) The urban affairs columnist for The New York Times breaks down the 1990 census into thematic chunks, looks at the numbers every which way and makes it all accessible.

Religion & Philosophy

THE DEATH OF THE MESSIAH. From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels. By Raymond E. Brown. (Anchor Bible Reference Library/Doubleday, 2 vols., $37.50 each; boxed set, $75.) A 1,600-page treatment by a distinguished scholar; meant for experts, readable by any interested person.

FIRE FROM HEAVEN: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century. By Harvey Cox. (Addison-Wesley, $24.) With a sympathetic eye, Mr. Cox explores the Christian movement that distinguishes itself from others with the belief that "speaking in tongues" is evidence of the Holy Spirit.

THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA. By H. J. A. Sire. (Yale University, $45.) A splendidly illustrated history of a colorful, aristocratic religious order, founded in 1113, that has survived numerous historical disasters and always discovered good works to do; at present its members care for the sick and run the smallest sovereign state in the world.

MARPINGEN: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By David Blackbourn. (Knopf, $35.) A beautifully balanced account of how a vision of the Virgin that appeared to three little girls rocked a small German village.

MARY MAGDALEN: Myth and Metaphor. By Susan Haskins. (Harcourt Brace, $27.95.) The fascinating story of how Mary Magdalene became a symbol for womankind and an object of devotion for Christians.

THE THERAPY OF DESIRE: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. By Martha C. Nussbaum. (Princeton University, $29.95.) A philosopher looks at the Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics as mental health practitioners -- practical philosophers concerned with anger, love and death.

Science

THE BEAK OF THE FINCH: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. By Jonathan Weiner. (Knopf, $25.) A fascinating look over the shoulders of biologists who watched natural selection in motion over some 20 years in finch populations.

BLACK HOLES AND TIME WARPS: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. By Kip S. Thorne. (Norton, $30.) A physicist proposes that modified, limited time travel is possible, clarifying his arguments for lay folk with illustrations and anecdotes.

BY THE GRACE OF GUILE: The Role of Deception in Natural History and Human Affairs. By Loyal Rue. (Oxford University, $27.50.) A professor of religion and philosophy argues that deceit, including self-deceit, is evolution's way of keeping us going in a universe that doesn't give a hoot.

THE CHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUS STATES: How the Brain Changes Its Mind. By J. Allan Hobson. (Little, Brown, $22.95.) With the patience of a wise and experienced guide, a Harvard psychiatrist sums up what he has learned in a lifetime of studying dreaming, sleeping and the brain, introducing the concept of the indivisible "brain-mind."

THE EVOLUTION OF RACISM: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science. By Pat Shipman. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A thoughtful study of how evolutionary theory was enlisted to abet or oppose racism; not all the bad guys meant ill, and the good guys sometimes fought dirty.

THE HUBBLE WARS: Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion-Dollar Struggle Over the Hubble Space Telescope. By Eric J. Chaisson. (HarperCollins, $27.50.) An insider's absorbing history, a technological thriller and an expose of the space project that has burned a huge hole in the nation's pocket.

HYPERSPACE: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension. By Michio Kaku. (Oxford University, $25.) Everything would make better sense, a physicist maintains, if there were 10 dimensions instead of 4; it remains to find the absconded dimensions, which are probably awfully small.

LYSENKO AND THE TRAGEDY OF SOVIET SCIENCE. By Valery Soyfer. (Rutgers University, $39.95.) In this passionate book, written by a Russian emigre, the life of Trofim Lysenko, the notorious Russian agronomist who forced modern biology and genetics underground, becomes a complex morality play.

THE MAKING OF MEMORY: From Molecules to Mind. By Steven Rose. (Anchor/Doubleday, paper, $12.95.) By studying memory, a neurobiologist seeks to bridge the gap between chemistry and consciousness, supporting his argument with experimental results.

A MAN ON THE MOON: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. By Andrew Chaikin. (Viking, $27.95.) The 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing is marked by this detailed and candid account of man's race to the moon, an event now enshrined in contemporary American mythology.

THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. By Frank J. Tipler. (Doubleday, $24.95.) Life is eternal, says a mathematical physicist, given the nature of this universe; a 123-page mathematical appendix is offered for skeptics.

THE RED QUEEN: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. By Matt Ridley. (Macmillan, $25.) A thoughtful work about sociobiology, arguing that species evolve not to win the struggle for survival but to avoid losing it.

THE SCIENCE OF DESIRE: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior. By Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A readable, cautious account, by a scientist and a journalist, of an investigation into whether homosexuality is genetically determined.

A SCIENTIST IN THE CITY. By James Trefil. (Doubleday, $23.95.) The author, who has written books that deal with the Creation and the seashore, has a fine sense of what lay folk don't understand; his rendition of the city's potential and the constraints on it is fascinating.

SHADOWS OF THE MIND: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. By Roger Penrose. (Oxford University, $25.) Mr. Penrose's assertion that only a new physics will explain mental life has been questioned, but he produces a fine introduction to quantum mechanics and what he thinks is wrong with it.

TALKING FROM 9 TO 5: How Women's and Men's Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard, Who Gets Credit, and What Gets Done at Work. By Deborah Tannen. (Morrow, $23.) A lively sociolinguist explores what her subtitle specifies.

VOYAGE TO THE GREAT ATTRACTOR: Exploring Intergalactic Space. By Alan Dressler. (Knopf, $25.) How seven astronomers (including Mr. Dressler) made a vexing discovery; more important, an inside story that reads like a novel about modern cosmology.

WRINKLES IN TIME. By George Smoot and Keay Davidson. (Morrow, $25.) An astrophysicist (Mr. Smoot) and a science writer relate an adventure yarn (exciting outdoor experiments go blooey) that is also an entree to modern cosmology.

Science Fiction

THE BREATH OF SUSPENSION. By Alexander Jablokov. (Arkham House, $20.95.) Ten varied and accomplished short stories by one of science fiction's most inventive new writers.

CALDE OF THE LONG SUN. By Gene Wolfe. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $22.95.) The third volume of "The Book of the Long Sun," a multivolume series, is a satisfying blend of religious allegory and densely plotted science fiction that features Patera Silk, one of Mr. Wolfe's best realized characters.

GREEN MARS. By Kim Stanley Robinson. (Spectra/Bantam, cloth, $22.95; paper, $12.95.) In this generously conceived, meticulously detailed sequel to "Red Mars," a disputatious band of scientists dabbles in utopian politics and literally rebuilds the planet by "terraforming" -- transforming Mars into something like Earth.

HEAVY WEATHER. By Bruce Sterling. (Spectra/Bantam, $21.95.) Led by a maverick mathematician whose brilliant brother may be the most dangerous man in the world, an engaging group of high-tech "tornado freaks" chases a monster twister across the West Texas plains.

THE IRON DRAGON'S DAUGHTER. By Michael Swanwick. (Avonova/Morrow, $23.) At the heart of this fantasy is the relationship between Jane, a feisty human changeling, and Melanchthon, a factory-built dragon bent on destroying the "techno mancers" who created him and then abandoned him.

MYSTERIUM. By Robert Charles Wilson. (Spectra/Bantam, paper, $11.95.) What happens when a man of forceful intellect but inchoate feelings gets exactly what he wishes for? This thoughtful page-turner puts sympathetic characters at risk in a world not quite beyond their imagining.

PARABLE OF THE SOWER. By Octavia E. Butler. (Four Walls Eight Windows, $19.95.) A gripping account of the gospel according to 15-year-old Lauren Oya Olamina, who not only survives the unraveling of law and order in 21st-century California but becomes the prophet of a new religion based on a sober revelation: "The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change."

QUEEN CITY JAZZ. By Kathleen Ann Goonan. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $23.95) With an almost self-destructive exuberance, this dizzying first novel explores the fearsome potential of nanotechnology, the science that gives imperfect humans a chance to remake the world in their own image.

Spies & Thrillers

AH, TREACHERY! By Ross Thomas. (Mysterious Press/Warner, $21.95.) The title is taken from Plutarch, the prose is free-flowing and funny, and the central character is a Vietnam veteran who works in a Wyoming gun shop and happens to be sitting on a hot political secret.

ALL FALL DOWN. By Lee Gruenfeld. (Warner, $21.95.) A smooth novel by a pilot, in which a disturbed genius learns to infiltrate the navigation systems of America's commercial planes.

THE FALL LINE. By Mark T. Sullivan. (Kensington Books, $20.) Interweaving flashbacks, stream of consciousness and action, this deft first novel is about a daredevil skier hunted by drug lords and Government agents.

OPERATION REMISSION. By Paul Johnson. (Nefyn & Shaw, paper, $12.95.) A timely and remarkable novel about an unconventional ex-soldier who was one of the Americans exposed to radiation after World War II and decides to get revenge by releasing radioactive gas into Congress.

RED INK. By Greg Dinallo. (Pocket Books, $22.) In this lively novel, a journalist in post-Red Russia investigates the murder of a bureaucrat and ends up working with a female American spy.

TRINITIES. By Nick Tosches. (Doubleday, $23.95.) In tough, rough prose, the author of biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin tells the tale of several restless octogenarian capos from Brooklyn who take back what they once owned, including the world's heroin industry.

Sports

COBB: A Biography. By Al Stump. (Algonquin, $24.95.) On his second go-round with the life of Ty Cobb, Mr. Stump provides the most revealing account we'll ever have of this hot-headed and magnificently talented baseball player.

THE CURSE OF ROCKY COLAVITO: A Loving Look at a Thirty-Year Slump. By Terry Pluto. (Simon & Schuster, $22.50.) A hilarious but penetrating examination of the Cleveland Indians' miserable history, written by a veteran sportswriter and long-suffering Tribe fan.

DON'T LOOK BACK: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball. By Mark Ribowsky. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A carefully researched biography tells the life of one of the greatest pitchers and personalities in baseball history.

THE LAST SHOT: City Streets, Basketball Dreams. By Darcy Frey. (Richard Todd/Houghton Mifflin, $19.95.) Mr. Frey examines the myth of deliverance through basketball on the courts of Coney Island, where black youths compete to be exploited by coaches, colleges and, in the rarest cases, by professional sports.

THE POLITICS OF GLORY: How Baseball's Hall of Fame Really Works. By Bill James. (Macmillan, $25.) The celebrated sabermetrician uses statistical analysis to try to determine who belongs in baseball's Hall of Fame, and who doesn't.

Travel, Nature & Adventure

AGUIRRE: The Re-Creation of a Sixteenth-Century Journey Across South America. By Stephen Minta (Holt, $20.) In 1560, a Spanish expedition traveled east from Peru and disappeared into the Amazonian interior. This captivating book attempts to retrace its doomed, infamous route in search of El Dorado.

ANIMAL HAPPINESS. By Vicki Hearne. (HarperCollins, $20.) The author of "Adam's Task" investigates, in these essays, what pleases animals; she finds, in many cases, that though creature comforts are important, what really tickles the beasts is the sense of a job well done.

A CHEF'S TALE: A Memoir of Food, France and America. By Pierre Franey with Richard Flaste and Bryan Miller. (Knopf, $25.) Assisted by two former colleagues at The New York Times, Mr. Franey covers some 70 years of gustation in two countries in this mouthwatering memoir.

HENRY JAMES: COLLECTED TRAVEL WRITINGS. Edited by Richard Howard. (Library of America, 2 vols., $35 each.) Close to 1,700 pages, in the aggregate, densely but never coarsely packed with the observations abroad (for abroad he usually was) of one upon whom nothing (as his own aspiration had put it) was lost.

IN THE CITIES AND JUNGLES OF BRAZIL. By Paul Rambali. (Holt, $23.) A savvy, vivid montage of Brazilian culture, high and low, as seen from the late 1980's onward.

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON: The Watercolors for "The Birds of America." Edited by Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (New-York Historical Society/Villard, $75.) The originals for the great engravings, handsomely reproduced, illuminated by helpful essays.

LONDON. By John Russell. (Abrams, $45.) Not a guide but a personal survey and celebration by a fine critic who seems to know his hometown as much through osmosis as through industry.

OKAVANGO: Africa's Last Eden. By Frans Lanting. (Chronicle, $45.) These moody photographs of the vast green wetlands in the center of the Kalahari Desert create a sense of unease, mystery and loneliness, and bear witness to our moral obligation to the land.

TRANSYLVANIA AND BEYOND: A Travel Memoir. By Dervla Murphy. (Overlook, $21.95.) An indomitable Irish travel writer, a self-described "political zombie," treks through Romania shortly after the 1989 revolution.

THE WAY TO XANADU. By Caroline Alexander. (Knopf, $23.) Inspired by Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Ms. Alexander seeks out sites -- from Mongolia to northern Florida -- that may have inspired the poem's imagery.


COUNTRY:  AFRICA (50%);

COMPANY:  HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS (57%);   HARVARD UNIVERSITY  (57%); HARVARD UNIVERSITY (57%); DUKE UNIVERSITY  (55%); DUKE UNIVERSITY (55%);

ORGANIZATION:  HARVARD UNIVERSITY  (57%); HARVARD UNIVERSITY (57%); DUKE UNIVERSITY  (55%); DUKE UNIVERSITY (55%);

GEOGRAPHIC:  AFRICA (50%);

SUBJECT: BOOKS AND LITERATURE  BOOK REVIEWS (95%); BIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE (90%); PROFILES & BIOGRAPHIES (90%); LITERATURE (90%); MUSIC (89%); FILM (89%); JAZZ & BLUES (89%); CHRISTMAS (78%); JOURNALISM (77%); PHOTOGRAPHY (76%); HISTORY (76%); MUSIC GENRES (76%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (76%); HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCE (76%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (75%); SONG WRITING (71%); DANCE (70%); SMOKING (67%); PHOTOGRAPHY SERVICES (60%);

PERSON:  MARLON BRANDO JR  (70%); HAROLD EDGAR CLURMAN  (54%);

LOAD-DATE: December 4, 1994

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

TYPE: Review; List

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company


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