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I AM SITTING IN RALPH WALDO EMERSON's study at the Old Manse, a gray clapboard house in Concord, Massachusetts, built by the writer's grandfather in 1769. More precisely, I am [...]

Byline: James Marcus The Public Poet When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ruled supreme. tifIllustration by Carson EllisAfter a century-old collapse, the poet's reputation shows some signs of revival.72 On March 26, [...]

Byline: James Marcus Blood Relations At the end of life, the doctor becomes a patient, the scientist a subject. tifIllustration by Tallulah Fontaine34 We like the heart to behave-no skipped [...]

DEVIATION By Luce D'Eramo Translated by Anne Milano Appel 347 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27. More than seven decades after the Red Army threw open the gates of Auschwitz, [...]

Were leaving Cochin. The driver, a smiling man with epaulets on his white uniform, had been hired for us by the hotel. Since he spoke Tamil plus just a few [...]

GENTLEMAN REBEL: The Memoirs of H. Stuart Hughes. Ticknor and Fields. 326 pp. $24.95. What do Michel Tournier, Pope John Paul II, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jurgen Habermas and Heinrich Boll have [...]

Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams-The Early Years, 1903-1940 by Gary Giddins Little, Brown 736 pages, $30.00 Is this the right moment to inaugurate a huge double-decker biography of Bing [...]

TRAPLINES By Eden Robinson. 215 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $23. At the age of 28, the Canadian writer Eden Robinson has already won a reputation as [...]

THE HOUSE OF OTHERS By Silvio d'Arzo. Marlboro/Northwestern University, cloth, $39.95; paper, $14.95. Born in the Italian backwater of Reggio Emilia in 1920, Ezio Comparoni died of cancer at the [...]

THE HOUSE OF OTHERS By Silvio d'Arzo. Marlboro/Northwestern University, cloth, $39.95; paper, $14.95. Born in the Italian backwater of Reggio Emilia in 1920, Ezio Comparoni died of cancer at the [...]

WHEN THE WORLD WAS STEADY By Claire Messud. 270 pp. New York: Granta Books. FIRST novelists sometimes feel obliged to furnish an upbeat ending. The post-modern tendency, of course, is [...]

HEADHUNTER By Timothy Findley. 440 pp. New York: Crown Publishers. $23. WITH eight books of fiction and a number of plays to his credit, including 'Famous Last Words' and 'The [...]

THE TEACHINGS OF DON B. Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme. Edited by Kim Herzinger. Introduction by Thomas Pynchon. 352 pp. New York: Turtle Bay Books. [...]

FANTASTIC TALES By I. U. Tarchetti. Edited and translated by Lawrence Venuti. Illustrated by Jim Pearson. 191 pp. San Francisco: Mercury House. $25. CALL an author 'minor' and you tar [...]

WATERMARK By Joseph Brodsky. 135 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. JOSEPH BRODSKY'S latest book, 'Watermark,' is a homage to Venice, a city to which the poet, essayist and [...]

LEAD: PRACTICALITIES: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jerome Beaujour. By Marguerite Duras. (Grove Weidenfeld, $15.95.) Marguerite Duras is probably best known in this country for her autobiographical novel ''The Lover'' and [...]

THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO: STORY OF A PUPPET by Carlo Collodi translated by Nancy Canepa Steerforth Italia The Adventures of Pinocchio, which Carlo Collodi first published, in serialized form, in [...]

THE HAUNTING OF L. by Howard Norman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 326 pages $24.00 On the face of it, Howard Norman's fifth book is a nice, comfy historical novel, set [...]

From a certain point of view, the history of the United States consists of one long domestication of nature. We have bridged rivers, leveled forests, and blasted roads in the [...]

SAUL AND PATSY by Charles Baxter Pantheon The stars of Charles Baxter's new novel, a wandering Jew and an infinitely adaptable Protestant, first appeared nearly twenty years ago, in the [...]

WHAT WAS SHE THINKING? by Zoe Heller Henry Holt At first glance the narrator of What Was She Thinking? might easily pass for one of Anita Brookner's sexless and sardonic [...]

VIOLENCE, NUDITY, ADULT CONTENT By Vince Passaro. 300 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $24. FOR a book critic, writing a novel must be pure hell. It's not merely that [...]

THE NUCLEAR AGE Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato succeeded in making a nightmare at once nightmarish and quotidian. To achieve this quality of terror subjected t the rhythms of the [...]

LEAD: RUNNING WILD. By J. G. Ballard. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $12.95.) Over the last 25 years, the British writer J. G. Ballard has touched a great many stylistic bases, [...]