Books: Summer Reading

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Fiction and history to beguile vacation hours

PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY AWARDS 1983 Edited by William Abrahams Doubleday; 344 pages; $16.95

Introducing this collection of 20 exemplary tales, culled from slick magazines and small literary journals, Editor William Abrahams notes: "However little attention they overtly pay to the public life of our time, these stories reflect in a more truthful way, at however indirect an angle of vision, the realities of contemporary life as most of us know it."

These mundane realities include the litany of woes that visit the unemployed in W.D. Wetherell's If a Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood: "The rags stuffed against drafts. The doctor's bills. The gas. The bare tires. The lottery tickets. The part-time jobs. The patches. The cutting back. The cold. The stove. The wood. The goddamn wood." John Updike's The City follows Computer Salesman Bob Carson's readjustment after an appendectomy: he was "trying to take again into himself the miracle of the world, programming himself." The aged farmer of William F. Van Wert's poetic Putting & Gardening discovers peace without change. On a Florida golf course his son observes him "on hands and knees, lovingly replacing my divot on . . . the only garden that is left for him." Like most of the ten women writers represented, Leigh Buchanan Bienen examines the everyday. Middle-class marriage is the subject, and only her narrator is exotic in My Life As a West African Gray Parrot.

Raymond Carver's A Small, Good Thing is precisely that: the progress of a couple recovering from the death of their son, rediscovering the savor of life at a bakery: "They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light . . . and they did not think of leaving." Carver's tale is distinguished not only for its deceptively simple, ultimately haunting style, but for its history. The original version was published in a collection of stories two years ago. Carver might have let it languish there; instead he chose to rework the material, enriching and enlivening it in the process. For years, obituaries have been written for the American short story; Carver's patient craftsmanship shows how vital the genre remains.

THE WARLORD by Malcolm Bosse Simon & Schuster; 717 pages; $17.95

The year: 1927. The place: prerevolutionary China. The situation: chaotic. Bandits and generals, distinguishable in some cases only by their uniforms, are battling for control of the country. Foreign opportunists skirmish for treasure. And China's peasants, as always, work, sweat and starve. Malcolm Bosse's novel re-creates the epoch and peoples it with an indelible cast, including a rising warlord named Chiang Kai-shek and a budding revolutionary called Mao Tse-tung.