The World of Apu. Actually titled Apur Sansar, this is the third part of Indian Director-Producer Satyajit Ray's vital and abundant trilogy that began with Father Panchali and continued with Aparajito, now brings its hero to marriage and eventual confrontation with tragedy.

Let's Make Love. Marilyn Monroe does a seismic shimmy, sings My Heart Belongs to Daddy, and carries on with Singer Yves Montand, but despite their efforts, the show is not really good low humor; it is merely good-humored.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. In this light, effective drama about an Oklahoma harness salesman's troubles, Robert Preston runs away with the show in a direction that Playwright William Inge may not have intended in the original.

TELEVISION

Tues., Sept. 27

Expedition! (ABC, 7-7:30 p.m.).* Films show wild-animal rescue operations during the building of the Kariba Dam on Africa's Zambesi River.

The Tom Ewell Show, (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). Premiere of situation-comedy series about Real Estate Man Ewell and family.

Bell & Howell Close-Up! (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Cast the First Stone, first of a series of 15 documentaries, examines racial prejudice in four Northern cities.

The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). The Cat and the Canary.

Wed., Sept. 28

Hong Kong (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Premiere of a new series about an American correspondent in Southeast Asia.

Astaire Time (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Music and dance with Astaire and Barrie Chase.

Thurs., Sept. 29

Guestward Ho! (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.). Premiere of a new series--based on the book by Patrick Dennis and Barbara Hooton--about dude-ranch life, always trying to stay with the Mame chance.

Outlaws (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). First in a series on the top thugs of the Oklahoma Territory in the 19th century.

The Witness (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A new series, produced by David Susskind, about the great heavies of all time, begins with a portrait of Lucky Luciano.

My Three Sons (ABC, 9-9:30 p.m.). Fred MacMurray in the first of a situation-comedy series about a widower and his offspring.

Person to Person (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Senator Kennedy and family.

Silents Please (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). First half of D. W. Griffith's French Revolution story: Orphans of the Storm, vintage 1922.

Fri., Sept. 30

The Flintstones (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Premiere of a cartoon situation-comedy series, created by the team that put Huckleberry Hound on the junior map, about a Stone Age family that presumably gets its milk in quartz.

Westerner (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). One more new oat.

Bell Telephone Hour (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Van Cliburn, Benny Goodman, Sally Ann Howes, Howard Keel, Ballerina Melissa Hayden. Color.

Michael Shayne (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Premiere for one more eye, this one blinking in Miami.

Eyewitness to History (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). A report on the top news event of the week.

Sat., Oct. 1

The Campaign and the Candidates (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Updating the race.

The Shari Lewis Show (NBC, 10-10:30 a.m.). Excellent ventriloquism and puppetry, by one of the best entertainers of the young. Color.

Sun., Oct. 2

General Electric Special (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Art Carney, Tony Randall, Janis Paige, Jane Powell, in a review about love in the U.S.

The Islanders (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Premiere of a series about the operators of a one-plane South Pacific air service.

Candid Camera (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Allen Funt's durable feature now becomes a show on its own, starting tonight with Arthur Godfrey as guest.

Mon., Oct. 3

Bringing Up Buddy (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Half the TV industry is trying to find more or less new situations for situation comedy--this series concerning two maiden aunts fussing over a bachelor nephew.

The Bob Hope Buick Show (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Among the guests: Bobby Darin.

The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). Premiere of a comedy series about a Southern small-town sage.

Dante (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Not culture--only vulture. This particular Dante's Inferno is a nightclub; the owner is played by Howard Duff, and the title of the first episode is One for the Birds.

THEATER

With more and more new plays opening after their tryouts, the season's fresh items include The World of Carl Sandburg, an evening of the poet's work more or less acted out by Bette Davis and Leif Erickson, which comes off as an agreeable recital, evoking a poet's world that is dramatically mild and a little ostentatiously benign. At the Phoenix, Tyrone Guthrie's production of H.M.S. Pinafore slaps salt freshness into Gilbert and Sullivan.

Still going strong are last year's hits, notably The Miracle Worker, Toys in the Attic, Bye Bye Birdie and A Thurber Carnival, whose cast now includes the author.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Man Next To Me, by Anthony Barker. The journal of an Anglican medical missionary to the Zulus, written with modesty and skill, is an inspiring account of brotherly love in the land of apartheid.

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, by Anthony Powell. Installment No. 5 of The Music of Time, a brilliant seriocomedy of Britain between the two World Wars, which combines the antic savagery of Waugh with the social savvy of Proust.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee, with photographs by Walker Evans. A new edition of a classic account of sharecropper life in the mid-Thirties, written with luminous love, raging anger, Christian anguish, and cascading torrents of poetry.

The Politics of Upheaval, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The third volume (covering 1935-36) of The Age of Roosevelt is, like its predecessors, sometimes too partisan, but it is sweepingly and spiritedly written.

The Black Book, by Lawrence Durrell. A glittering, impudent, outrageous novel, all murk and manifesto, written by the author of the Alexandria tetralogy when he was 24 and had just made the heady discovery that he was a very good writer.

The Human Season, by Edward Lewis Wallant. With uncommon insight and accuracy, the author writes of an aging plumber's descent into hell after the death of his wife.

The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth. The hero of this bawdy, ironic, hilarious and yet thoroughly serious comedy, is a 17th century coffeehouse Candide who stumbles through a series of wild misadventures before he understands his great sin: he is guilty of innocence.

Taken at the Flood, by John Gunther. An entertaining, if perhaps excessively appreciative biography of Pioneer Adman Albert Lasker, the genius personally responsible for tattooing such blather as "That Schoolgirl Complexion" on the American consciousness.

Decision at Trafalgar, by Dudley Pope. Best of the current blood-in-the-scuppers accounts of the great battle.

The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis. The late great Greek writer saw God as the search for God. Temptation is his soaring, shocking final vision of that search.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Advise and Consent, Drury (1)*

2. Hawaii, Michener (2)

3. The Leopard, Di Lampedusa (3)

4. The Chapman Report, Wallace (4)

5. Water of Life, Robinson (8)

6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (7)

7. The Lovely Ambition, Chase (5)

8. Away from Home, Jaffe

9. The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis (6)

10. Diamond Head, Gilman (9)

NONFICTION

1. Born Free, Adamson (1)

2. How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market, Darvas (2)

3. Enjoy, Enjoy! Golden (7)

4. The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater (5)

5. Folk Medicine, Jarvis (4)

6. The Good Years, Lord (8)

7. May This House Be Safe from Tigers, King (3)

8. The Liberal Hour, Galbraith

9. I Kid You Not, Paar (6)

10. Felix Frankfurter Reminisces, Frankfurter with Phillips (9)

* All times E.D.T.

* Position on last week's list.

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