EVERY year about 30,000 new titles are printed in the U.S. Putting aside paperbacks (about 7,500), textbooks (more than 2,000) as well as thousands of specialty volumes of limited interest, that leaves some 5,000 hard-cover books which each year come to TIME'S Book Section for examination and possible review. Choosing between them week by week as they arrive is an often agonizing, always time-consuming process, even though many swiftly prove 1) badly written, 2) wretchedly edited, and 3) largely unnecessary. In this issue, instead of choosing, we attempt to give the reader a sampling of the American literary overflow by presenting thumbnail reviews of one whole week of books (excepting a handful, mostly how-to guides and Christmas specials) to be published between Oct. 18 and 24.
Novels
BANEFUL SORCERIES by Joan Sanders. 352 pages. Houghton Mifrlin. $6.95. The mock memoir of a French girl whose marriage to a decadent nobleman is complicated by black Masses and poisonings —some of which actually scandalized the court of Louis XIV. The author succeeds elegantly with baroque setting and sinister plot.
'ENCYCLOPEDIA by Richard Horn. 157 pages. Grove Press. $4.95. The hapless love affair of hopeful Poet Tom (Americana) Jones and wealthy, bohemia-bound Sadie (Britannica) Massey is cross-referenced in brief, satirical, encyclopedic passages from ABORTION to zoo CAFETERIA. What you can't look up, you can't put down.
ERMYNTRUDE AND ESMERALDA by Lytton Sfrachey. 75 pages. Stein and Day. $5.95. A novelistic joke by the author of Eminent Victorians protests repression through the letters of two sexually inquisitive girls. Written in 1913 and rather cutesie-pie, with terms like pussy cat and bow-wow for private parts.
THE FRUITS OF WINTER by Bernard Clavel. 382 pages. Coward-McCann. $6.95. Mere and Pere Dubois cope less with World War II than with the grim guerrilla assaults of old age in this incessantly poignant, Goncourt prizewinning novel of French village life.
THE COUNTRY CLUB by Nancy Bruff. 339 pages. Bartholomew House. $6.95. Worldly doings and undoings on and around a posh golf course. Pure tripe, but wait until you see the movie.
IN A WILD SANCTUARY by William Harrison. 320 pages. Morrow. $6.95. Four Chicago grad students in a suicide pact that begins as a joke and ends with tragedy. Sensitive and full of suspense.
COMING-OUT PARTY by Richard Frede. 237 pages. Random House. $5.95. To pay off a $20,000 debt, a writer is forced into a job with the CIA, etc.
THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR by Sam Greenlee. 248 pages. Baron. $4.95. A CIA "house nigger" drops out to train black teen-agers as "Freedom Fighters." A schizophrenic first novel by a young black, the book blends James Bond parody with wit and rage.
ALP by William Hjortsberg. 157 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95. A honeymooning American couple, a witch, a dwarf, assorted deaths, a mad seduction in a careening telepherique—adding up to zero.
THE IMMORTALS OF THE MOUNTAIN by C. Virgil Gheorghiu. 186 pages. Henry Regnery. $5.95. This novel about Rumanian peasants mistreated by landholders is far below The Twenty-Fifth Hour, the author's post-World War II story of concentration camps.