A Selection of the Year's Best Books

THE LIONHEADS by Joshua Bunting. A novelized indictment of military ambition and callousness during one Viet Nam battle, written by a 32-year-old former infantry major who served with the U.S. Army in Southeast Asia.

THE LATE GREAT CREATURE by Brock Brower. An oldtime horror-movie actor attempts to refurbish the glories of the gothic and macabre traditions in a time of cheap thrills.

THE SUNLIGHT DIALOGUES by John Gardner. In the finest novel of the year wisdom and magic turn a small American town into the metaphysical crossroads of the modern world.

THE TEMPTATION OF JACK ORKNEY AND OTHER STORIES by Doris Lessing. The author of The Golden Notebook moves with keen intelligence over some of the major issues of our time.

EDWIN MULLHOUSE by Steven Millhauser. This skillful first novel is both a literary Nabokovian joke--about an 11-year-old who writes the biography of a dead playmate--and an affecting memoir of childhood.

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO BE STRANGERS by Larry McMurtry. The elegiac, funny and tender story of a 23-year-old writer whose small-town Texas life is abruptly changed into a series of nostalgic leavetakings by sudden success.

TRANSPARENT THINGS by Vladimir Nabokov. The great novelist in a clever book about a publisher who strangles his wife while he is asleep.

AUGUST 1914 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Russia's defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg during World War I. Badly translated but monumental.

THE CASE HISTORY OF COMRADE V by James Park Sloan. A government scientist in the County of L-- is accused of a statistical error and persecuted by an enigmatic bureaucracy. Kafka with mirrors.

THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER by Eudora Welty. A muted Southern tale about dying and surviving and what can be salvaged through genteel memory and raw feeling.

NONFICTION

VIRGINIA WOOLF by Quentin Bell. The novelist's nephew sees his famous aunt painfully forging a unique art despite an eccentric family, madness, and the burden of being a woman.

JOURNEY TO IXTLAN by Carlos Castaneda. The third and best book about the wisdom and magic of the Yaqui Indian Sorcerer Don Juan Matus.

MIGRANTS, SHARECROPPERS, MOUNTAINEERS and THE SOUTH GOES NORTH by Robert Coles. The second and third volumes in a series by a Harvard sociologist who examines poor Americans with love and squalor.

THE COMING OF AGE by Simone de Beauvoir. The 64-year-old author of The Second Sex urges a revolution in values and behavior to provide for the old and improve the society that tries to forget them.

FIRE IN THE LAKE by Frances Fitz-Gerald. Vietnamese life seen in a historical context that makes the war seem more hopeless and foolish than ever.

A CHILD CALLED NOAH by Josh Greenfeld. A father's account of caring for an autistic child, told with extraordinary tact, and a quiet outrage against fate and the medical system.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST by David Halberstam. In a series of political profiles, the author tells how overconfidence helped lead to the morass in Viet Nam.

POWER AND INNOCENCE by Rollo May. An eminent and eloquent psychoanalyst examines people's need for power as a basis of self-respect.

THE CHILDREN OF PRIDE edited by Robert Manson Myers. More than 1,500 pages of letters written by members of a Southern plantation family from the 1850s through the Civil War.

MIDNIGHT OIL by V.S. Pritchett. The second installment of the celebrated British critic's charming autobiography tells how he became a writer and Parisian sophisticate during the 1920s.

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