Fiction Notes

Japanese novelist and essayist Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) first published Shanghai serially between 1928 and 1931. Filled with beautiful and disturbing imagery, it focuses on the lives of a group of Japanese expatriates living in Shanghai, a veritable cauldron of political and social unrest. In a time of strikes and riots, idealism and despair, people of various cultures (from sullen prostitutes to sketchy businessmen, including a man who exports human skeletons) try to make sense of life and love in their shifting, chaotic world. Dennis Washburn's graceful translation is augmented by an insightful afterword. (Univ. of Michigan, $34.95 242p ISBN 1-929280-00-9; paper $16.95 -01-7; May 1)

In January 1938, Josef Erdman arrives in Maribor, Slovenia, as the specter of World War II looms in Drago Jancar's Northern Lights (trans. by Michael Biggins). A kind of drifter, Josef befriends some of the townspeople and has an affair with the beautiful and mysterious Margerita, the wife of one of his new friends. His presence begins to draw unfavorable attention—he is accused of consorting with Communists—as animosity rises between Germans and the locals. Jancar, one of Slovenia's foremost writers, skillfully infuses even the most mundane events with foreboding, dread and paranoia. (Northwestern Univ., $49.95 259p ISBN 0-8101-1838-6; paper $16.95 -1839-4; May 1)The Day They Took My Uncle and Other Stories is a collection of 15 shorts by novelist Lionel Garcia, dealing mostly with working-class and poor inhabitants of the southwestern U.S. Difficulties encountered by Latinos in America are a recurrent theme. Characters include a divorcée who seduces her plumber, a stressed-out orderly in a Houston emergency room, an El Salvadoran army sergeant who develops a fascination with the Kennedys, and the mentally ill man of the title story whose impending institutionalization throws his neighborhood into chaos. Though the situations he describes are often bleak, Garcia mixes some humor in with the pathos. (Texas Christian Univ., $22.50 216p ISBN 0-87565-235-2)