New To Read: A Collection Of Cynthia Ozick's Essays

Paperback pick of the week

"A Cynthia Ozick Reader," edited by Elaine M. Kauvur (Indiana University Press, $17.95). It worked for William Faulkner when a shrewd selection of his work, published as "The Portable Faulkner," helped draw attention to the great Southern writer a few years before he won the Nobel Prize. Maybe it will work for Cynthia Ozick, whose essays and stories are among the finest published in the last several decades, but who has yet to win the audience she deserves.

Gathered here are some bristling, incandescent tales and thorny essays that show Ozick at her finest. No one turns a phrase in quite the way she does, blending the elegant verve of Henry James, one of her literary heroes, with the wisecracking mournfulness of Jewish New York, her stomping ground. Among the fiction highlights are "A Mercenary," about one Stanislav Lushinski, "a Pole and diplomat . . . not a Polish diplomat" (he represents an African country in the U.N.), and two stories featuring Puttermesser, a wry and feisty Jewish lawyer from the Bronx of whom Ozick writes, "with a Negroid passion she hated the Breck shampoo girl."

Ozick's essays include provocative examinations of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Henry James, as well as a delightfully feisty piece ("Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character") that explains why novelists "invent, deceive, exaggerate, and impersonate for several hours every day, and frequently on the weekend." Lastly,

seven of Ozick's poems are offered here, rounding out this well-chosen profile of an impressive career.

Fiction

"Beach Music," by Pat Conroy (Bantam, $7.99). The latest from the author of "Prince of Tides" is about a Southern writer living in Rome and trying to come to grips with his family's grim past, following his wife's suicide. Seattle Times reporter Kimberly B. Marlowe praised the book's "black-humored magic."

"Practical Magic," by Alice Hoffman (Berkley, $6.99). A tale about two sisters unable to shed the influence of the two witch-like aunts who raised them. In her Seattle Times review, Nancy Pearl wrote that Hoffman's magic-realist touches seemed "heavy-handed," but found the book "still worth reading."

"Galatea 2.2," by Richard Powers (HarperPerennial, $13). In this cyber-updating of "Pygmalion," the narrator undertakes the education of a computer-based neural network until it wants to know more than he can tell it: name, sex, reason for existing. Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

"Splitting," by Fay Weldon (Grove, $12). The latest from the London-based comic novelist ("The Life and Loves of a She-Devil") concerns a woman whose divorce prompts her disintegration into multiple personalities.

"Microserfs," by Douglas Coupland (ReganBooks/HarperPerennial, $13). Disgruntled Microsoft employees start a software company of their own, in the latest from the author of "Generation X." Seattle Times reviewer Elizabeth Aoki described Coupland as "a master of ironic juxtaposition," but found many of the book's conflicts "too neatly resolved."

"Of Love and Other Demons," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Edith Grossman (Penguin, $11.95). The Nobel laureate's new novel concerns a priest's ill-fated love for a troubled young girl in need of exorcism. In her Seattle Times review, Kathleen Alcala found the book "beautifully and compellingly written" but limited in having a heroine who is "merely an ideal object of love rather than a source of emotion herself."

Nonfiction

"In Pursuit of the English" and "Going Home," by Doris Lessing (HarperPerennial, $13 each). Welcome reissues of early Lessing memoirs. The first brilliantly recounts Lessing's first year in a most peculiar London boarding house, following her move there from her native Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) in 1949. The second is a report on her 1956 visit to Africa when Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia had just been joined under a unified colonial administration.

"The Path to Power," by Margaret Thatcher (HarperPerennial, $18). The second volume of the former British prime minister's memoirs is actually a "prequel" to "The Downing Street Years," and describes her childhood, education and entry into politics.

"Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth," by William Bryant Logan (Riverhead, $12). A history of soil that combines science, philosophy and history in chapters with titles such as "The Theory of Silt" and "Clay and Life."

"Drinking the Rain: A Memoir," by Alix Kates Shulman (Penguin, $11.95). The noted novelist ("Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen") tells of abandoning political, literary and family life to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine.

"Born Fi' Dead: A Journey Through the Jamaican Posse Underworld," by Laurie Gunst (Holt, $12.95). A woman's account of the 10 years she spent studying the international Jamaican gangs that began migrating to the U.S. just as the crack wave of the 1980s took off.

"Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway," by Clifford Stoll (Anchor, $14). A controversial Internet pioneer decides that being online isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"The Downsizing of America" (Times Books, $14). The New York Times' seven-part investigative series on the disappearance of white-collar jobs in the U.S. has been expanded into book form, with additional material and selective reader response added.

Anthologies

"The Penguin Book of Women's Humor," edited by Regina Barreca (Penguin, $15.95). Emily Dickinson, Cynthia Heimel and many others join unlikely company in this eclectic anthology assembled by the author of "They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted."

"Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile," edited by Marc Robinson (Harvest, $16). Joseph Brodsky, Edward W. Said and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are among the contributors to this wide-ranging essay collection.

"Without a Guide: Contemporary Women's Travel Adventures," edited by Katherine Govier (Hungry Mind, $16). This gathering of writings by Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, E. Annie Proulx and others is just one title in a paperback series recently launched by Hungry Mind Press, an offshoot of the Minnesota-based literary quarterly, Hungry Mind Review. Others include Michael Arlen's 1975 National Book Award winner, "Passage to Ararat" ($15); Robert Treuer's nature classic, "The Tree Farm: Replanting a Life" ($14); and a memoir by Seattle's own John Douglas Marshall, "Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey" ($16).

"Street Lights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience," edited by DorisJean Austin and Martin Simmons (Penguin, $14.95). A paperback original, with contributions from Bebe Moore Campbell, Kelvin Christopher James and others, covering the full gamut of African-American metropolitan life.