Notable

IN JOY STILL FELT by Isaac Asimov Doubleday; 828 pages; $19.95

The prolific professor has produced more than 200 books, as well as a feast of science-fiction stories, articles, essays and verse. Yet according to Isaac Asimov, the repast is prologue. For many of the author's previous works have been written to earn a living; the latest, his 216th, is a labor of love. Its subject: the author's favorite, Isaac Asimov. Heavy enough to produce bursitis and double the price of standard scifi, the second installment of Asimov's autobiography appears formidable. It turns out to be even more entertaining than Volume I, In Memory Yet Green. Covering the years between 1954 and 1978, In Joy is a detailed account of the writer's literary recognition, his marital failure, his thyroid cancer, his heart attack and the trauma of turning 40: "But the evil day came. On January 2, 1960, I was forty years old. To be sure, there's nothing wrong with middle age, but it comes hard to a person who is a child prodigy by profession. Of course, I have never permitted myself to act old, or to admit to being old or even middle-aged in public. I maintain always that I am 'a little over thirty' and that I am 'in my late youth.' " The book may tell more than anyone wanted to ask about the life of America's most accomplished explainer. But it does it so disarmingly that readers should be almost as fascinated with its subject as he is with himself.

ORWELL: THE TRANSFORMATION by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams Knopf; 302 pages; $12.95

Animal Farm by H. Lewis Allways? Nineteen Eighty-Four by Kenneth Miles or P.S. Burton? These were some of the pseudonyms that the young English writer Eric Blair considered when he published his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933. He settled, of course, on George Orwell. But far more was involved than a name change, argue Stansky and Abrahams (authors of the 1972 biographical study The Unknown Orwell). Blair was feeling his way as a minor novelist, self-absorbed and "unremittingly nonpolitical." By the time Eric fully became George, he was passionately political in every line. The transformation was triggered by the poverty, unemployment and neglect he saw while researching The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Then the Spanish Civil War confirmed his vision of a new socialist order--and gave him an education in the treachery of internecine politics. In between these experiences, he married his first wife, a bright, game girl named Eileen O'Shaughnessy. One of the delights of this sensitive, intelligent book is its portrayal of Eileen and of her importance to Orwell's new identity. In their first summer together, they kept a sparse little shop (candy, string, tea, flour) in a country village, gardening and tending goats and chickens while Orwell worked on Wigan Pier. Through all his later years of anguished achievement and fame, write the authors, "the happiness of that long-ago summer would never be recaptured."

FOREIGN MATTER by Christopher Byron Doubleday; 253 pages; $10

To pass this earnest first novel off as a thriller ("danger in the air" and "a beautiful, secretive woman" are promised on the jacket) may be good marketing, but the book is better than its cover. True, Foreign Matter, written by TIME Associate Editor Christopher Byron, starts off with a full tank of international petropolitics and foreign intrigue: Why is the CIA promoting phony rumors of an oil strike in the Aegean? Why is the Greek secret service trying to cover up Cypriot gunrunning? Into this muddle stumbles Alexander Montgomery, a battle-scarred correspondent who has fled to an obscure Greek island for some R. and R. Always the reporter, Montgomery cannot resist trying to find answers to the diplomatic chicanery he detects all around him. But in the process, he loses the beautiful woman, the scoop he was after and, eventually, his arrogance and cynicism. Politics and skulduggery recede in importance, and the journalist discovers that life's magic and mystery may be more precious than hard facts. As Montgomery's elusive lady tells him, "Sometimes the truth really is simple and pure and just as you see it." Purely and simply, this is no mere thriller.

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