LEFTOVER LIFE TO KILL (262 pp.)Caitlin ThomasAtlanticLittle, Brown ($4.50).
If God does not exist, says Ivan Karamazov, everything is permitted. To his wife Caitlin Thomas, Poet Dylan Thomas was Godor so she suggests. Her book is a searingly candid chronicle of what she permitted herself (very nearly everything) in the first year following Thomas' death in Manhattan in 1953. Leftover Life to Kill will shock and infuriate some readers, make passionate partisans of others. The book's most remarkable quality is not its wild, keening dirge for the dead poet, but its revelation of...