The Year's Best

THE CONNOISSEUR by Evan S. Council Jr. A businessman descends into the joys of collecting pre-Columbian art and gradually loses himself to his possessions.

THE EBONY TOWER by John Fowles. A masterful conjurer turns some stolid themes (art v. life, passion v. responsibility) into five glittering stories brimming with allusion and intelligence.

LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS by Vladimir Nabokov. At 75, the old artificer has written a sly, funny fiction about an exiled Russian nobleman and novelist who resembles a certain writer with the initials V.N.

THE BARKING DEER by Jonathan Rubin.

The Viet Nam War as a grim fairy tale, ruefully seen from a Montagnard village trapped between alien protectors.

DOG SOLDIERS by Robert Stone. An epitaph for the late 1960s etched in acid, this brilliantly bleak novel traces three muddled Americans and a stash of Vietnamese heroin through the counterculture rubble of California.

NONFICTION

THE POWER BROKER by Robert Caro.

The portrait of New York's master planner Robert Moses, a ruthless visionary who built toward a city of the future and found that power corrupts and so does the internal-combustion engine.

SUPERSHIP by Noel Mostert. Writing like a skilled novelist, the author documents the costs and dangers of the oil tankers that grew out of Middle East tension and the energy crisis.

ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE by Robert M. Pirsig. A haunting memoir by a father who has recovered from a breakdown and tries to protect his young son from the man he once was.

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A passionate and excoriating account of the evolution of Soviet injustice by a victim (and patriot) who praises (and personifies) "the fearlessness of those who have lost everything."

THE LIVES OF A CELL by Lewis Thomas.

In a series of witty and often profound essays, a scientist sees the world not in a grain of sand, but in the pullulations of a single cell.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.