The Year's Best

FAR TORTUGA by Peter Matthiessen. With much dialogue and a minimum of description, nine flawed and simple men hunt turtles in the southwest Caribbean and become actors in an elemental drama of the sea.

THE MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR by

Doris Lessing. In a vision that veers between allegory and nightmare, a lone woman exists in a futuristic urban landscape of frightful anomie.

HUMBOLDT'S GIFT by Saul Bellow. An obscure old poet dies and his onetime protege suffers in this seriocomic meditation by a major American writer on the value of art and the price of success.

RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow. J.P.

Morgan consorts with Henry Ford, Freud visits Coney Island, and turn-of-the-century America comes of age in this lilting syncopation of fiction and history.

JR by William Gaddis. In his first novel since The Recognitions (1955), the author chronicles the improbable fortunes of an eleven-year-old tycoon and takes a gargantuan swipe at contemporary skyscrapers of Babel.

NONFICTION

EDITH WHARTON: A BIOGRAPHY by

R.W.B. Lewis. The aristocratic 19th century American novelist is revealed to have lived in anything but the Age of Innocence.

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN

MEMORY by Paul Fussell. A unique examination of how the horrors of the 1914-18 war gave birth to 20th century imagination in art and culture.

THE CIVIL WAR, A NARRATIVE by

Shelby Foote. The third and concluding volume of the most richly detailed historical narrative of the American Civil War.

HOW THE GOOD GUYS FINALLY

WON by Jimmy Breslin. A political-clubhouse view of Watergate and the year's freshest book on the subject.

PASSAGE TO ARARAT by Michael J. Arlen. The tribes of the Bible leap from the page, the victims of mass murder speak out in this intensely personal history of Armenia by a gifted descendant.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.