Off for the Sweet Hereafter, T. R....

Off for the Sweet Hereafter, T. R. Pearson (Linden/Simon & Schuster). “One of the funniest books I have read in a long time.” T. R. Pearson examines and exposes “without pity small-town life and small-town sensibility in the American South” (Fred Chappell).

New Women and New Fiction, edited by Susan Cahill (NAL/Mentor), is “a fine anthology, with sufficient scope to suggest the variety of possibilities of artistic accomplishment and also of real life. That the stories are all by women is not, in the end, a crucial factor. This work is neither feminist nor feminine in any limiting sense; it is just good writing “ (Madison Smartt Bell).

The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, John Clendenning (University of Wisconsin). Royce’s arguments for absolute truth and the reality of an all-encompassing deity may seem Victorian, but “as this biography successfully shows, Royce was the decisive influence on the course of academic thought in the United States in the last 100 years” (Bruce Kuklick).

The Loss of Self: A Family Resource for the Care of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders, Donna Cohen Ph.D. and Carl Eisdorfer Ph.D. (Norton). “Anyone who expects someday to be living with an elderly person should read this book. . . . The authors offer an excellent summary and translation of the medical literature on dementia and mention some very recent research not covered in currently standard medical texts” (Gwen Yourgrau).

Fools and Other Stories, Njabulo Ndebele (Readers International). “Intricate and subtle, these five long stories set in Niger are an extraordinary example of Western literary techniques skillfully applied to African experience” (Elaine Kendall).