Now in Paperback

A Woman Named Solitude, Andre Schwarz-Bart (Creative Arts). Conceived shortly after her mother is sold into slavery in the West Indies, Solitude grows up in a culture where black solidarity is, at best, a fantasy. The slaves, writes Schwarz-Bart, a French novelist who joined the Resistance after his parents were taken by the Nazis, “moved like ships on the sea, each with its own compass, its own itinerary, each propelled by the sails of its own fancy.”

Marin: The Place, the People, Jane Futcher (text) and Robert Conover (pictures) (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). No more cartoons about hot-tubbing next to marijuana plants on the redwood deck. Futcher and Conover are too mesmerized by the county’s farmlands, isolated villages, mountains and commuter suburbs facing the sea. Color photographs complement newspaper clippings and narrative about the county’s evolution, from the time English explorers bemoaned “thicke mists and most stynkinge fogges” to suburbanization--”first the ferries, then the trains, finally the bridges.”

The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Zoltan Tar (Schocken). Writing in the shadow of World War II, Horkheimer and Adorno argued the need for “emancipatory reasoning”--measuring the human condition on the basis of justice, peace and happiness--and warned against “instrumental reasoning”--determining, without reflection, effective means for any accepted purpose.

The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties, William Wiser (G. K. Hall). And don’t we all fantasize that we could have been there too, along with Sylvia Beach, Hemingway, Hadley, Bumby, F. Scott and Zelda, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Josephine Baker, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Picasso . . . .

The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike (Fawcett). One is a sculptress who could create thunderstorms, another, a cellist who could fly, the third, a gossip columnist who could turn milk into cream. A sequel to “Couples,” where the characters were young and their sexual games and longings had an undercurrent of sacred ritual to them. Yet here, Richard Eder wrote, the magic turns “from innocent to black,” and the characters are older, “full of the power that comes somewhat from age and somewhat from living no longer for anything but oneself.”

The Runner’s Handbook, Bob Glover and Jack Shepherd (Penguin). A revised edition of this 1975 work became necessary, the authors write, because of the recent growth in the number of runners and corporate fitness programs. Aimed at beginning and intermediate runners, the handbook includes chapters on training programs, running for the disabled, weight training and stress management.

Darkness Visible, William Golding (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The book opens as a naked child steps with solemn gait out of a fire ignited by a bomb raid on London during World War II. Called Number Seven, after the series of operations necessary to keep him alive, he is the first of many mysterious and unsettling characters. Yet in Number Seven’s struggle to find out “Who Am I?” “What Am I?” or in another character’s realization of his own triviality, Golding shows these people to be from the same source as you and I--humanity. Golding wrote “Lord of the Flies” and won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature.