The YEAR'S BEST

A LEGACY, by Sibille Bedford. A cool, backward look at Victorian and Edwardian Europe, a time when the big rich were truly idle and upperclass life was dedicated to an endless battle with boredom. Middle-aged First-Novelist Bedford turns the cosmopolitan novel, a rare enough product nowadays, into an immensely entertaining remembrance--and indictment--of things past.

A LIGHT FOR FOOLS, by Natalia Ginzburg. A brief, near-poetic story of ordinary lives mired in the despair of Mussolini's Italy. Conceived in sympathy and written at the level of simple truth, it is one of the best Italian novels in years.

THE FALL, by Albert Camus. This year's Nobel Prizewinner edging away from existentialism toward religion in an effort to pinpoint the dilemma of modern man. His boozy, sometimes boring hero tries hard to believe that man is the center of all things, yet is more than half persuaded that he is wrapped in original sin.

THE FLYING BOX, by Mary McMinnies. An astonishingly good first novel about fumbling Britons who still pretend that they are carrying the white man's burden in Malaya. The decline and fall of Empire is measured by the spurious successes of a black-marketeering London spiv who finds loot among the ruins.

PNIN, by Vladimir Nabokov. About an emigre Russian professor at a U.S. college whose joyously ridiculous English and congenital helplessness only faintly conceal the sorrow of exile.

THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE, by John Cheever. The most ruefully amusing novel of the year, a story about an old New England family on the skids, with a cast of pathetically brave left-behinds, hilarious eccentrics and nice youngsters who lack the gumption of their elders.

THE FEAST OF LUPERCAL, by Brian Moore. A book which proves that Novelist Moore's excellent first, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956) was no accident. Malice, spite, envy and sexual frustration at a boys' school in Ireland add up to ignorance triumphant--and pathos on every page.

BERLIN, by Theodor Plievier. The end of Hitler, Berlin and Germany, seen in a flaming novel that has the hallucinatory quality of a firelit death dance. The last book of a trilogy (Stalingrad and Moscow were the other two) that, collectively, tops the fiction of World War II.

THE ASSISTANT, by Bernard Malamud. An aging Jewish Brooklyn grocer, a holdup and a thief's remorse seem hardly the substance of a good novel. This book becomes one through its tender, realistic grasp of the meanings, small defeats and even smaller victories in the lives of seemingly hopeless people.

THE TOWN, by William Faulkner. The malignant, unsavory Snopeses taking over Yoknapatawpha County from the noble old families who once controlled it and gave it graciousness. Intricate and convoluted as the book is in plot and in sentence, Faulkner gives it the air of a sly village idiot's barbershop yarn.

IN THE TIME OF GREENBLOOM, by Gabriel Fielding. A too-sensitive English schoolboy goes astray on the devious paths of life and love, comes to believe that the game is not worth the candle, but is brought back to himself through the influence of Horab Greenbloom, one of the flashiest intellectual priests of the life-to-the-hilt school in recent fiction history.

PLATERO AND I, by Juan Ramon Jimenez. One of the best-loved books of the Spanish-speaking world, by the 1956 Nobel Prizewinner--138 prose poems about life and death in the author's home town in Spain. The poems are addressed to the narrator's companion, a donkey, with bittersweet and sensuous grace and delicacy.

JUSTINE, by Lawrence Durreli. Not to the taste of every literary palate but a special delight for those who can savor the sensuous, the sensual and the unsavory all at once. The heroine is a sex-surfeited Jewess in Alexandria who does not understand herself, in or out of bed. The reward for the reader is an unforgettable impression of both the oddly exciting and sordid sides of a Near Eastern city.

BY LOVE POSSESSED, by James Gould Cozzens. The best U.S. novel of the year, wrought of many kinds of love and their power to strengthen or warp character, make or break the lives of man or woman. Through its lawyer hero, the book also deals with something most U.S. novelists have forgot about--man's responsibility to man.

NOT BY BREAD ALONE, by Vladimir Dudintsev. No great shakes as a novel, but an important book, published in the West despite Moscow protests. With toughness and sarcasm, a Russian living in Russia in effect damns the Soviet regime, its bureaucracy and cynical disregard for individual aspiration.

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, by James Agee. A hymn to life, sung in the story of a man's death and the complex of feelings that course through the hearts and minds of his family. The novel's greatest strength is in its delicacy, the most unusual effects gained from a loving knowledge of the tragedy that underlies the usual.

LAST TALES, by Isak Dinesen. Gothic stories ranging in scene from Denmark to Italy, and turning on the tragic ironies that bow kings as well as poets and murderers. Superior fare for those who like a mixture of the sublime, the grotesque and the supernatural.

NONFICTION

THE ORGANIZATION MAN, by William H. Whyte Jr. A thoughtful and critical study of the growing numbers of Americans who tend to live, work, think and play within the framework of the large corporations that employ them. No off-the-cuff call for nonconformity for its own sake, the book (a surprise bestseller) spells out the need for genius and just plain individuality to speak in their own voices.

THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, by Theodore Draper. The first volume of an important history by an ex-Communist who has both the objectivity and the dogged patience to tackle the subject. No joy for the casual reader, it offers a sober account of Communism's lust for power, and of the incredible nonsense involved in Communist theory.

THE MERCHANT OF PRATO, by Iris Origo. A biography of a 14th century Tuscan merchant reconstructed from bales of letters and ledgers. What could have become a dreary recital is in fact a shrewd look at an early capitalist, a fine piece of social history and a graceful piece of writing.

COMMON SENSE AND THE FIFTH AMENDMENT, by Sidney Hook. Plentifully supported by logic and his own common sense, Philosopher Hook shows how sentimental, not too commonsensical liberals have accepted the Fifth Amendment as a shelter for the just and the unjust alike. Sidestepped by many reviewers and attacked by others, it makes more sense about the Fifth than any book in years.

THE LION AND THE THRONE, by Catherine Drinker Bowen. Biography in the grand manner; the life and times of Sir Edward Coke, who became the watchdog of the common law, bluntly told British kings that law was their sovereign and defined legal principles that stand triumphant three centuries later.

THE NEW CLASS, by Milovan Djilas. A top

Yugoslav Communist, now in a Tito prison, decides after a lifetime of Marx worship that the commissars have done a wretched job, run prison camps instead of states and are far more greedy materialists than the capitalists. Certainly nothing new, but significant coming from Tito's ex-buddy.

GOGOL, by David Magarshack. A sound, readable biography of the little 19th century Russian neurotic who became one of his country's great novelists. Incredibly, he exposed corrupt Russian bureaucracy and the horrors of serfdom in books of genius while obsessed with the notion that he was really helping to preserve the Russia he loved.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND FOREIGN POLICY, by Henry A. Kissinger. A book by a Harvard political scientist that, though pre-Sputnik, is still must reading for top military and diplomatic planners. Author Kissinger warns that no Soviet shifts of policy must obscure the basic fact that each new move is a step towards world domination, brilliantly argues that the U.S. must be ready and willing to fight small wars to a winning finish if the world is not to be lost through a succession of new Koreas.

WARWICK THE KINGMAKER, by Paul Murray Kendall. A vivid, expertly handled biography of the Earl of Warwick, the fascinating 15th century British kingmaker who fought in turn on both sides in the bloody civil Wars of the Roses, eventually became drunk with power and died while trying to drink more.

GIVE US THIS DAY, by Sidney Stewart. A grim and unforgettable book about World War II by a young draftee who was captured on Bataan, liberated by the Russians in Manchuria after suffering more than three years of horror and maddening brutality.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, by John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth. The seventh and concluding volume of the massive work that Historian Douglas Southall Freeman did not live to finish. Somewhat woodenly written, it is still a competent completion of the most searching and definitive life of George Washington ever undertaken.

THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF AMERICAN PAINTING, by Alexander Eliot. The rich and varied story of American painting superbly fixed in 250 color reproductions, its development and creators described in text (by TIME's art editor) that is at once informative, informal and critically penetrating.

THE CHARLES M. RUSSELL BOOK, by Harold McCracken. A fine serving of Americana. Next to Frederic Remington, "Kid" Russell was the most popular artist of the U.S. West. His pictures quivered with action, spoke with the light and loneliness of the wide open spaces he learned to love as a cowboy. Nearly 200 illustrations, 35 in color, together with a readable, sympathetic biography.

PRE-COLUMBIAN ART, by S. K. Lothrop, et al. A stunning collection of aboriginal American art, beautifully photographed, mostly in color. From handsome Mexican pottery to Aztec masks and Peruvian textile designs, the emphasis is on useful or ceremonial art that frequently achieves high reaches of imagination and workmanship.

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