Current Paperbacks : TRUST ME: Short Stories<i> by John Updike (Fawcett Crest/Ballantine: $4.95) </i>

John Updike is one of our best novelists, but his skills may be even better suited to the short story. In this masterful new collection, he is at the height of his powers, writing of men and women in middle age, of divorce and remarriage and, in an extraordinary story called “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd,” of the decline, if not failure, of an entire way of life.

In “Still of Some Use,” a divorced man visits his marital home and helps his ex-wife and children clean out the attic in preparation for the house being sold. In “Getting Into the Set,” an anxious housewife envies the apparent grace and carelessness of the other successful young couples in her small town. In “Made in Heaven,” he depicts an entire marriage, from courtship to the wife’s death, so evocatively and with such intimacy that it’s as if one has known these people all one’s life.

NOT DYING: by F. Robert Rodman (W.W. Norton: $7.95) This is Robert Rodman’s heart-rending memoir of the last six months of his wife Maria’s life--from the abdominal pain that was diagnosed as ovarian cancer, her subsequent hysterectomy, the cancer’s metastasis to the lungs, to her death at age 37.

Rodman, a physician and psychoanalyst, found himself in a double bind: trying to remain optimistic for the sake of his wife and family, but, as a doctor, knowing that once the second malignant tumor was found, she would live only another two to three months.

“Not Dying” began as a kind of family record to reconstitute a life (“She had thick blond hair falling to her shoulders, incredible blue-green eyes . . . a woman with unerring judgment about people”). But the notes he made also record his personal responses to the crisis, his attempts to alter the treatment by a Swedish surgeon. In spite of his efforts, he is plagued with self-recrimination. In the end, the doctor whom Rodman had been bullying says, “Your wife is the bravest woman I have ever known, and you have done everything a man could do.” A courageous, inspiring and ultimately devastating work.

THE OTHER NUREMBERG: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials by Arnold C. Brackman (Quill/William Morrow: $9.95) Arnold Brackman was 23 years old in 1946 when UPI sent him to Tokyo to report on the war crimes trial of the leaders of the Japanese government. The trial would last 2 1/2 years; 419 witnesses would testify, exposing grievous and hitherto unreported acts of barbarity and murder, of medical experiments and torture against the civilian populations of China, the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as Allied prisoners of war.

“The Other Nuremberg” is the exhaustive record of that trial, a portrait of the prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, witnesses and defendants.

Writing in these pages, David Williams said that “The Other Nuremberg” is “a remarkable work” but suffers from a “moral naivete and my-country-right-or-wrong prejudice. . . . The Japanese wartime leaders frequently come across as paper cutouts with black hats.”

OUR AMERICA: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence

by Jose Marti translated by Elinor Randall; edited by Philip S. Foner (Monthly Review Press: $7.50) Jose Marti, the Cuban poet and patriot, is perhaps best known for the song based on his verse, “Guantanamera,” and for his critical role in the Cuban War for Independence, launched in 1895 to eliminate Spanish dominion.

The collection of Marti’s writings under review, “Our America” (that is, Spanish-speaking America), is the second of four volumes of Marti’s critical writings, published articles and letters, reissued by the Monthly Review Press and brilliantly annotated by the renowned historian, Philip S. Foner.

In this volume, Marti discusses other wars of independence from Spain waged in Latin America in the early 19th Century. But most significant are the documents establishing the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892.

Running through “Our America” is Marti’s fear that U.S. imperialist aims will attempt to fill the vacuum left once Spain is expelled from Cuba. In one of his last letters before death in combat, he writes: “The Cuban war has come to America in time to prevent Cuba’s annexation to the United States.”

MAN MEETS DOG: by Konrad Z. Lorenz translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson (Penguin Books: $6.95; illustrated) A charming analysis of animal behavior by the Nobel Prize laureate, author of “King Solomon’s Ring” and “On Aggression.” Konrad Lorenz is our contemporary Dr. Doolittle, and, in this anecdotal account, he explains to us how dogs and cats think.

We learn, for example, that there are two basic categories of dogs: those primarily descended from the jackal (poodles, terriers--adoring, affectionate, somewhat craven in their sycophancy) and those primarily descended from wolves (Chow Chow, Alsatians--more aloof, but, contradictorily, even more loyal). “The Lupus dog does not possess those Oedipus complexes of the more domesticated dog which converts his master to a cross between a father and a god; he treats him much more as a colleague.”