YEAR'S BEST

FICTION The Flounder by Gunter Grass. Germany's finest novelist orders up a vast helping of Northern European history for his tour de force that joins themes of nutrition, sexual politics and the inevitability of love and folly. The Stories of John Cheever. The author's reputation as a master of the American short story is now signed, sealed and delivered in this gathering of nearly 50 years' work that mythologizes the anxious affluence of the suburban class. The World According to Garp by John Irving. A long family novel that exhibits awesome talent for meshing melodrama and tragedy, pathos and comedy. Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer. In his eighth novel the Nobel laureate again evokes his native prewar Warsaw in a tale of a young man who turns from fortune and freedom to be true to his traditions. The Coup by John Updike. An imaginary African nation--arid, politically awry and culturally deformed by cheap Western goods--is the stage for this bittersweet, vividly written book.

NONFICTION A Childhood by Harry Crews. The novelist's eccentricities are muted in this memoir of an inexhaustible literary arena, the Depression South, when "there wasn't enough cash money in the county to close up a dead man's eyes." A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. By detailing the tears and triumphs of the human condition in 14th century Europe, the author gives a human face to one of the most disastrous of centuries. American Caesar by William Manchester. A sometimes overwrought but always compelling account of General Douglas MacArthur, an authentic hero brought up by military tradition and brought down by private arrogance. A Personal Adventure by Theodore H. White. The megajournalist in search of history recalls the sights, sounds, persons and episodes he witnessed while whipping around in the slipstream of American power. A Place for Noah by Josh Greenfeld. The story of an autistic child and his coping family, told with warmth and unfailing humor.

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