Books: Best Of 1980

FICTION. Neighbors by Thomas Berger. A surreal, slapstick comedy about life in exurbia. Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler. The literary life, the shenanigans of the rich and newly rich, the pains of middle age and the importance of family loyalties, by Canada's most engaging novelist. Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow. The author of Ragtime plays intricate and haunting blues variations on the American dream during the Great Depression. Italian Folktales, selected and retold by Italo Calvino. One of Italy's best novelists takes time out from his own fiction to become the Brothers Grimm of his own country. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. The wry and delicate humor of this distinguished Southern short-story writer is fully concentrated in this gathering of her works.

NONFICTION. Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl E. Schorske. Seven essays on the city where art and science flourished and the seeds of tyranny were planted. China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston. The second book by the author of The Woman Warrior, about growing up Chinese in the U.S., is the Oriental equivalent of Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers. Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel. The dean of U.S. pundits revealed as a fallible man. American Dreams: Lost and Found by Studs Terkel. The latest chorus of voices of hope and trouble, edited and affectionately arranged by the oral historian. Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan. A thorough, artful analysis of the first all-American poet, by the author of the Pulitzer prizewinning Mister Clemens and Mark Twain.

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