Books: YEAR'S BEST

FICTION The Flounder by Gunter Grass. Germany's finest novelist orders up a vast helping of Northern European history for his tour de force that joins themes of nutrition, sexual politics and the inevitability of love and folly. The Stories of John Cheever. The author's reputation as a master of the American short story is now signed, sealed and delivered in this gathering of nearly 50 years' work that mythologizes the anxious affluence of the suburban class. The World According to Garp by John Irving. A long family novel that exhibits awesome talent for meshing melodrama and tragedy, pathos and comedy. Shosha...

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