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TELL ME A RIDDLE, by Tillie Olsen. These are four short stories, delicate as fugues, the most ambitious of which tells of the bewilderment of a pair of old radicals who reminisce about hunger and human rights while their grandchildren sun themselves in the cathode glow of the affluent society.
THE MOVIEGOER, by Walker Percy. The hero, a prosperous young securities salesman, spends most of his time watching movies because he finds his comfortable life weary, stale and flat, although profitable. What makes this familiar malaise noteworthy is that First Novelist Percy is a natural writer (and a Southerner, if this is not a redundancy) who makes his people look and sound as if they were being seen and heard for the first time by anyone.
FRANNY AND ZOOEY, by J. D. Salinger. Acclaim came early and loud for Salinger; now, as automatically as if they were operated by clockwork, critics pop out to say "nay." No matter; these two related stories about Franny Glass's flight into religious obsession are the artistic success of the year. There may be trouble ahead in the work in progress of which the stories are a part, but there seems at least a chance that the chronicle of the prodigious Glass clan will be one of literature's towering family sagas.
FACES IN THE WATER, by Janet Frame. The heroine of this touching and largely autobiographical novel spends nine years in a New Zealand insane asylum. The author's eye is cool and accurate, her evocation of madness unforgettable.
ASSEMBLY, by John O'Horo. The author would have been well served by an editor nervy enough to throw out a handful of these 26 stories, the worst of which merely prove that O'Hara's footing is uncertain in the soul's lower depths. But as an observer of sight, sound and mood he has few peers, and the stories in which he sticks to his franchise are among his best efforts in years.
IPPOLITA, by Alberto Denti di Pirajno. The novel is set in igth century Italy, and the wit and irony with which it deals with its themes—the raveling aristocracy, the Italian blood mania for land—suggest Giuseppe di Lampedusa's fine novel. The Leopard. Coincidentally, both books were written by Sicilian dukes of advanced years.
FIRST FAMILY, by Christopher Davis. The reader may be familiar with the genre—1 "hat happens when Negroes move in next door—but is likely to be surprised by the quality of this fine novel, which steadily honors prose above propaganda, whose characters are as complex as the issues that set neighbor against neighbor.
POETRY
THE ODYSSEY, by HOMER, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Within the limits he set himself—to render the violent old fable as a spoken-verse story in today's idiom—Fitzgerald has succeeded admirably. Almost inevitably, given the earthbound character of modern English, the translation contains more thought than thunder.