Elizabeth Hardwick is perhaps America's most insightful literary critic. American Fictions  (Random House) collects five decades of her essays, many of which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, a journal she co-founded. Bartelby in Manhattan, an earlier collection of her essays, is not to be missed.

Tom Jenks's San Francisco Chronicle review of American Fictions

Charity (Doubleday) is Mark Richard's second collection of stories and extends the amazing range of shadow-play and wicked humor that characterized his PEN/Hemingway Award-winning collection, The Ice at the Bottom of the World. The stories in the new collection originally appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, Grand Street, and The Oxford American.

How did a willing-to-please mama's boy from Decatur, Georgia, grow up to become a nationally famous humorist?  As Mark Twain once observed, the secret source of humor is suffering, not joy.  In Be Sweet (Knopf), Roy Blount guides us through his own life with the knowledge that between happiness and sorrow, what we all want to come back to is happiness.

Cities of the Plain  (Knopf), the concluding volume of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy harkens back to the first volume, All the Pretty Horses, and brings the youthful characters of that story into the close of the horseback era that spawned them. McCarthy's biblical narration and apocalyptic vision focus on a love story between a cowboy and an epileptic whore whose pimp will not let her go and on the friendships, accommodations, and antipathies in life that spell survival or death. A contemporary master of the novel, McCarthy gives maximum meaning and pleasure to the form.

Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell's only novel, was hailed on its publication in 1954 by Jean Stafford, James Agee, Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and many others as a masterpiece of incisive satire. John Crowe Ransom wrote in the New York Times, " ... it is one of the funniest American novels in three decades." A glorious send-up of literary types and academia, Jarrell's novel is astonishing for its range of insight into character and the intelligence, poetry, amusement, and sheer brilliance of each of his sentences. Sadly, the novel is out-of-print but can be easily located via Bibliofind.

No Other Book is a retrospective collection of essays and occasional pieces by poet, novelist, and critic Randall Jarrell, whom Adam Gopnick recently praised in the New Yorker as having already written everything (thirty years ago) that Gopnick, looking ahead on his own career, had hoped to write.  Jarrell's literary and cultural assessments read as if they were written today.  His perceptions are accurate; his spirit, nimble and genial to the reader (if not always to the writers and subjects under his criticism).

The Undiscovered Stories of Anton Chekhov presents 38 stories, most of which have not previously appeared in English.  Many of these stories are the early ones on which his reputation in Russia was made but which Constance Garnett and other translators did not include in their collections of his work.  This new volume is a delightful addition to the available work of Chekhov in English.  Published in 1998 by Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts St., NYC, NY 10013, and edited by Peter Constantine, this collection has already become somewhat hard to find, but it is worth the search.  A good rare book dealer can locate it for you.

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