Cold Heaven by Brian Moore; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; New York. That the supernatural is alive and well is the animating principle of Brian Moore’s tour de force Cold Heaven. He makes no attempt to rob this idea of its force by invoking the mantic arts or the favorite occult ploys of the horror movie...
A Little Tour in France by Henry James; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York Mark Twain was so disgusted by the superficial and sentimental nonsense in most American travel books that he said he wanted to eat “a tourist for breakfast.” But instead of devouring American tourists he delightfully caricatured their bungling stupidity, their romantic...
The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays by Max Black; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. One of the moderately interesting—and ultimately most annoying—things that one can do with a home computer is to put it into a GOTO loop. That is, a program is a series of steps. To make a loop, the final instruction...
Worstword Ho by Samuel Beckett; Grove Press; New York. The Twofold Vibration by Raymond Federman; Indiana University Press; Boomington. Beckett continues. While there has been a sense of ending from the beginning, the pauses, as he nears 80, seem . . . felt, not studied. Genuine. The words emerge, repeat, proliferate, press onward, enjamb, stall,...
House of Slammers by Nathan Heard; Macmillan; New York. “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” So wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in “The Soul and Barbed Wire” about his experience in the Soviet Gulag. Like most inmates in the communist penal system,...