November Publications

Edited by Ulrich Baer, and drawing on the enormous resources of New York's literary community, 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 is a surprisingly supple commemoration of disaster. Short-short stories and poems by New York writers are the collection's raison d'être, but personal testimony creeps in as well. The best entries approach the subject most obliquely or humorously—Jonathan Ames's Nabokovian "Womb Shelter," David Hollander's moving "The Price of Light and Air," Nathalie Handal's lovely "The Lives of Rain," Lev Grossman's hilarious "Pitching September 11," among many others. More predictable are the "where-I-was-and-what-I-thought" pieces (often by the better-known writers). Overall, this collection proves the transformative power of art. (NYU, $22.95 336p ISBN 0-8147-9905-1)

A Muslim soldier returns to his village at the end of the Bosnian War in Natasha Radojcic-Kane's bitter, stunning debut, Homecoming. The novel's rare, unvarnished portrait of village life and its inexorable march toward a grim showdown make it worthy of comparison to García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But Radojcic-Kane fosters a sense of existential despair that clearly situates her story in the Eastern European tradition. Halid, her protagonist, a golden boy tormented by a crime he committed as a soldier, spends three days wandering the streets of his village, unwilling to go home and sinking ever further into a morass of old and new grievances. The physical and moral decay of the village and its inhabitants are the mirror of his own terrible fall from grace. (Four Walls Eight Windows, $19.95 192p ISBN 1-56858-239-0)

The devastation of Afghanistan during the Soviet war is succinctly and piercingly conveyed in Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi (trans. from the Persian by Erdag M. Göknar), a novella-length account of an old man's futile journey. Dastaguir and his grandson Yassin wait beside a guard post on the road to the mine where Dastaguir's son Murad works. The family's village has been bombed, and everyone else in the family is dead; Yassin was deafened by the attack. While he waits for a ride to the mine, Dastaguir is visited by fantastic visions ("You find yourself standing on the branch of a jujube tree, stark naked"). The blasted dreamscape of Rahimi's story and his tightly controlled prose make this a sobering literary testament to the horrors of war. (Harcourt, $19 96p ISBN 0-15-100698-9)

On December 25, a new live-action version of the classic tale Pinocchio, starring and directed by Roberto Benigni, will open in the U.S. Many versions of the original story by Carlo Collodi are already available, but Steerforth Press is issuing a new edition of The Adventures of Pinocchio for the occasion. Fluidly translated from the Italian by Nancy Canepa and sporting stylish line drawings by Carmelo Lettere, this should prove a tasteful alternative to the inevitable tie-in edition, and if prominently displayed could sell well over the holidays. Collodi's witty, satiric tale is much harsher than its Hollywood adaptation, and grownups will appreciate it as much or more than children. (Steerforth, $12.95 paper 224p ISBN 1-58642-052-6)

Correction: The price of Shadowmakers, by Ralph Wetterhain (Forecasts, Nov. 11), is $26.