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- January 3, 1983 BOOKSBEST OF '82
-
- FICTION
-
- Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa. One of
- Latin America's leading writers transforms the vagaries of his
- youth into a daring, multilayered novel about love and art in
- Lima, Peru.
-
- Bech Is Back by John Updike. Henry Beck, an exquisitely blocked
- author, returns, marries and almost accidentally produces a
- bestseller in one of Updike's most adroit and lively comic
- performances.
-
- The Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Nobel
- laureate chooses 47 tales of demons, dybbuks and exuberantly
- flawed men and women, set mainly in his native Poland and his
- adopted Manhattan.
-
- The Dean's December by Saul Bellow. In a tale of two cities,
- Bucharest and Chicago, another Nobelist meditates on the dual
- natures of freedom and totalitarianism.
-
- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler. The family
- that dines together declines together in this bittersweet novel
- of a brave and eccentric Baltimore household.
-
- NONFICTION
-
- Bronx Primitive by Kate Simon. A leading travel writer voyages
- back to her childhood for an unsentimental assessment of
- immigrant life and her coming of age in New York, circa 1920.
-
- Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman. Karen Blixen, a modern
- Scheherazade, lived as a baroness in Denmark and a farmer in
- Africa; along the way she produced haunting stories, none more
- complex and intriguing than the one of her own life.
-
- Late Innings by Roger Angell. Baseball's unofficial scorer
- replays five turbulent seasons and still finds plenty of warm
- memories in the summer game.
-
- Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson. The first wife of the
- late John Berryman looks back at the years she spent among a
- brilliant and damaged generation of poets.
-
- The Last Kings of Thule by Jean Malurie. An Arctic adventurer
- in the tradition of Peary, Cook and Rasmussen poignantly
- describes the lives of Greenland's Eskimo nomads as the 20th
- century encroaches on their Sahara of ice and snow.
-
-