his list has been selected from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of December 2000. It is meant to suggest some of the high points in this year's fiction and poetry, nonfiction, children's books, mysteries and science fiction. The books are arranged alphabetically under genre headings. Click here for the nonfiction list.

THE ABOMINATION. By Paul Golding. (Knopf, $26.) A smart, angry first novel full of beautiful surfaces, including that of the hero, if that's the word, who wanders through gay London seething with contempt for his milieu and hatred for the grown-ups who deformed his childhood.

ACCORDING TO QUEENEY. By Beryl Bainbridge. (Carroll & Graf, $22.) Samuel Johnson and his friend Hester Thrale are the subjects of this novel as they appear to Hester's daughter; her case of mother-daughter conflict urges her toward forgetfulness, not understanding.

AFTERIMAGE. By Helen Humphreys. (Metropolitan/Holt, $23.) A Canadian writer's lyrical, alluring novel, a kind of gloss on the life of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron; the character at its heart, however, is a passionately self-educated housemaid from starving Ireland who serves as a model and as the prize in a family tug of war.

AGAINST LOVE POETRY. By Eavan Boland. (Norton, $21.) Poems consistently feminist, domestic and devoted to the poet's native Ireland; Boland argues that the sweet, icky stuff that passes for love poetry is no such thing. Her concern is with polarities of love and control, against thoughtless submission but much in favor of sacrifices in partnership.

AIDING AND ABETTING. By Muriel Spark. (Doubleday, $21.) Spark at 82 can still manipulate characters so daringly their most improbable acts seem self-generated; in this instance, two men who claim to be the murderous Lord Lucan (missing since 1974) gang up to blackmail a Paris psychiatrist who is as unlikely as they are.

ALMOST. By Elizabeth Benedict. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) A nearly-mystery novel nicely constructed around a ghastly premise: Sophy, the narrator and protagonist, has found new love with Daniel in the last stage of her divorce from Will when Will is found dead in dreadful circumstances. Complications ensue, of course.

AMERICAN SON. By Brian Ascalon Roley. (Norton, paper, $13.) Two half-Filipino brothers can pass for white, but their mother cannot; painful conflicts are in store for everybody in this novel's complex exploration of racism in California, starting in 1993, a year after the Rodney King riots.

AMONG THE MISSING. By Dan Chaon. (Ballantine, $22.) This unnerving collection of stories concerns mothers who hit the road, fathers who fly the coop, a husband who keels over, a boy who steps behind a bush and is never seen again. The characters seem not to know what they are doing, but the author does.

THE ARTIST'S WIFE. By Max Phillips. (John Macrae/Holt, $23.) Phillips's novel is narrated from inside the selfish, mean, witty head of Alma Mahler (1879-1964), who married, in succession, Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel, when not playing around with Oskar Kokoschka, and outlived just about everybody.

BABE IN PARADISE. By Marisa Silver. (Norton, $23.95.) A disquieting first collection of short stories, set in Los Angeles, where fame and wealth are the core of life and Silver's characters rotate on the periphery, doing what they must to develop wisps of hope.

BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS. By Anne Tyler. (Knopf, $25.) A kind of optimistic fatalism pervades Tyler's 15th novel, in which a 53-year-old mother, stepmother and widow abandons false starts and fantasy, realizing that "your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be."

THE BAY OF ANGELS. By Anita Brookner. (Random House, $23.95.) In her 20th novel, Brookner shifts her customary focus on an anomie-bedeviled heroine caught in the confusion between life and literature to ponder the freedom that accompanies the acceptance of limitations.

THE BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. By Anne Carson. (Knopf, $22.) Poems are they, these objects? Whatever, they are bold and abbreviated, they fear no free association and no kind of knowledge or desire and are overtly concerned with the ways intellectual discernment can clash with erotic taste.

BIG AS LIFE: Three Tales for Spring. By Maureen Howard. (Viking, $23.95.) A triptych of novellas somehow based on the seasons: a professor's love affair with an executive; an Irish beauty's moral and charitable discoveries in New York; and a thematic exploration of John James Audubon, the birdman who killed for his art.

THE BIOGRAPHER'S TALE. By A. S. Byatt. (Knopf, $24.) An exhilarating fable that divides the house of letters into theorists, scholars and practitioners; its hero, a small but "perfectly formed" scholar, is writing the life of a writer who wrote the life of a writer who wrote, or maybe intended to write or not, about Galton, Linnaeus and Ibsen.

BLUE DIARY. By Alice Hoffman. (Putnam, $24.95.) Sunny magic realism and weather to match give way to Hoffman's characteristic themes of loss and deception in this novel when the husband of an otherwise happy family is arrested for a rape and murder; he confesses the crime to his wife, who must figure out how much truth she will be able to tolerate.

THE BODY ARTIST. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $22.) A tiny, intimate metaphysical ghost story by a master creator of huge, panoramic fiction; it concerns a woman alone in a large seaside house, where a strange man appears in an unused room. DeLillo's pinpoint prose copes with big themes, like the structure of time and the artist's approach to calamity.

THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER. By Amy Tan. (Putnam, $25.95.) A novel of multiple narratives that puts to use the experiences, in very different countries and ages, of daughter, mother and grandmother to construct a family story and find the place in it for the youngest generation.

BORDER CROSSING. By Pat Barker. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) An emotionally astute novel on public themes, in which a charming 23-year-old psychopath comes back to wreck the life of the child psychologist who helped send him to jail 13 years earlier.

THE BOSTONS. By Carolyn Cooke. (Mariner/ Houghton Mifflin, paper, $12.) A network of connections between these short stories illuminates from more than one point of view a sort of clique of aging, prosperous Bostonians and the rough, unprosperous Maine community where they traditionally spend their summers.

CARRY ME ACROSS THE WATER. By Ethan Canin. (Random House, $23.95.) The water is almost certainly the Styx, as contemplated from some small remove by this novel's protagonist, a Pittsburgh beer baron whose protective arrogance is compromised by the eruption, unbidden, of 78 years' worth of memory.

CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL. By Glen David Gold. (Hyperion, $24.95.) A grandly plotted novel with a framework of real history that recaptures a lost era of live entertainment; Carter, a brilliant stage magician with some connection to the death of Warren G. Harding, tangles with a Secret Service out to hurt him.

THE CENTER OF THINGS. By Jenny McPhee. (Doubleday, $22.95.) Marie Brown, the heroine of this engaging, amusing first novel, is an aspiring tabloid writer and quondam graduate student in philosophy of science. Now 39, she still hopes for true love, professional advancement and an understanding of physical reality.

THE CHEESE MONKEYS: A Novel in Two Semesters. By Chip Kidd. (Scribner, $25.) Fiction, by a notable graphic designer, that feels autobiographical and sometimes acts like a manifesto on graphic design; its hero, a student at a big state university in 1957-58, himself has heroes: a bold, sexy, bohemian woman and a challenging, confrontational design professor.

THE COLD SIX THOUSAND. By James Ellroy. (Knopf, $25.95.) America teems with conspiracy in this novel of the period between the Kennedy assassinations; the Klan, the F.B.I., the Mormons, the C.I.A. and Howard Hughes all seem to be involved, none of them on the side of truth or justice.

COLLECTED POEMS. By James Merrill. Edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. (Knopf, $40.) A big, handsome volume that displays Merrill's absorption and re-emission, transfigured, of every kind of experience this planet has to offer.

COLLECTED STORIES. By Ellen Gilchrist. (Little, Brown, $27.95.) This thick sampling of Gilchrist's work over two decades gives plenty of scope for tracking her recurrent Southern heroines through her recurrent theme: that we are saved from regret and free-floating cynicism by the wonders of chance and love.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF RICHARD YATES. (Holt, $28.) Yates's focus on human weakness and self-deceit never made him all that popular in his lifetime (1926-92), so it's a joy tempered with apprehension to see this unflinching volume in which people trick themselves into seeking what they don't want.

COME UP AND SEE ME SOMETIME. By Erika Krouse. (Scribner, $22.) Short stories populated by intelligent, wisecracking, bruised women, insecure, white and around 30; to find and keep love is what they want to do but can't, and Krouse's grasp of dark comedy lets her squeeze them beyond the limits we are used to.

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ISAAC BABEL. Edited by Nathalie Babel. (Norton, $39.95.) The total product of the marvelous writer who tried to create a synthesis of the Russian, the Jewish, the literary and the revolutionary, a mix that bestowed life on his fiction but could not save him from death on Stalin's orders in 1940.

THE CONFESSIONS OF MYCROFT HOLMES: A Paper Chase. By Marcel Theroux. (Harcourt, $23.) The title is a tease about sibling rivalry; beyond it, there's a mystery involving a balance of forces somewhat like those in the author's real-life family, a burglary, a manuscript and an exercise of the novelist's imagination.

CRAWLING AT NIGHT. By Nani Power. (Atlantic Monthly, $24.) In this first novel by a young writer with a strong feel for the grim and the squalid, the central characters, a Japanese sushi chef in Manhattan and an alcoholic waitress, fall for each other and hit the road, intending reform but showing few of the necessary skills.

THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER. By Daniel Woodrell. (Marian Wood/Putnam, $23.95.) An unattractive 13-year-old boy, Shuggie, is the narrator of this violent, intense novel set in the Ozarks, acute in its rendering of the boy's incestuous jealousy for his mother and his rage at the men who bid for her attention.

THE DEATH OF VISHNU. By Manil Suri. (Norton, $24.95.) A deft, confident first novel that rarely departs from the landing of a Bombay apartment building, where a servant with the name of a god lies dying, while upstairs a nominal Muslim struggles with spiritual difficulties, seeking "the rapture of faith."

DEMONOLOGY: Stories. By Rick Moody. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) Accomplished, fearless short stories that examine the exchange of energy between language and loss; inhabited mostly by young people whose heads are smarter than their hearts, and illuminated, sometimes, by barrages of emotional and rhetorical fireworks.

THE DEVIL'S LARDER. By Jim Crace. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.) Sixty-four brief fictions that require the reader to settle for not knowing exactly what is going on when tourists, for example, are tormented with snacks that induce "chemical mirth."

DIRTY HAVANA TRILOGY. By Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A ribald, earthy novel by a Cuban living in Cuba; the narrator, a former journalist who has fallen out with the Castro government, expertly evokes sensuous experience in his prose, and that experience is chiefly of poverty and sex, one of which helps him to survive the other.

THE DYING ANIMAL. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $23.) The third Roth novel to star David Kepesh (title character of ''The Breast" back in 1972) brings an old man's perspective to the characteristic needy, argumentative voice of Roth's heroes without cracking the solipsism and self-regard.

ECLIPSE. By John Banville. (Knopf, $23.) In Banville's 12th novel, an actor, a man already heartlessly detached from his wife and daughter, loses all sense of being himself and hides out at his childhood home, alone with himself, the reader and a highly communicative narcissism.

ELECTRIC LIGHT. By Seamus Heaney. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.) Heaney's new book of poems is a compendium of poetic genres set in an array of forms and tuned to many kinds of experience, the work of a mature poet and world citizen, aware of his cultural authority as a public man and of the rights and responsibilities that go with it.

EMBERS. By Sandor Marai. (Knopf, $21.) First published in Budapest in 1942, this elegant novel, set in a vast estate and the vanished splendor of Hapsburg empire, peaks in an amazing confrontation after 40 years between two of the parties in an adulterous turn-of-the-century triangle.

EMPIRE FALLS. By Richard Russo. (Knopf, $25.95.) A humane sympathy for weakness does not rule out stern satiric judgment in this satisfying novel about several generations in a Maine mill town that sickens as the textile industry that sustained it perishes; Russo is brave enough to conceive a large ambition, but too smart to overreach.

ESTHER STORIES. By Peter Orner. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, paper, $12.) A first collection of short stories, many of them revolving around two Jewish families; history and geography invest characters with a real-life sense of passing time and changing place. Cause and effect are little invoked; life is understood in sidelong glances.

EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE. By Margot Livesey. (Holt, $23.) A Scottish woman, born in 1920, is accompanied all her life by a woman and a girl who are invisible to everyone else in this often sad and scary novel. Sometimes they help her out, sometimes they determine her life without regard to her own preferences. And they never explain themselves.

THE FAITHFUL NARRATIVE OF A PASTOR'S DISAPPEARANCE. By Benjamin Anastas. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Not really a narrative at all, for starters; a seductive, virtually plot-free examination of American culture, and particularly of a family of conspicuous consumers who are conscious of their sin but unable to stop committing it.

FAITHLESS: Tales of Transgression. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.) Stories featuring themes like terror, female passion, male identity, loneliness, divorce, death and gun ownership, by an immensely productive author who wants us to be afraid of ourselves and shows us why.

THE FEAST OF THE GOAT. By Mario Vargas Llosa. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A bloody end is never in doubt in this novel starring Gen. Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic for 30 years; the suspense comes from wondering which of Vargas Llosa's nightmare characters will be the one to succeed him.

THE FLIGHT OF THE MAIDENS. By Jane Gardam. (Carroll & Graf, $25.) A subtle, clever coming-of-age and generational-conflict novel involving three girls in England and their families (or the missing members of families); set in 1946, it makes excellent use of the dislocations and deprivations caused by World War II.

FLIGHTS OF LOVE: Stories. By Bernhard Schlink. (Pantheon, $23.) A first collection of fiction that features chiefly repressed, depressed men, emotionally buffered by success and propriety; the author, a German lawyer and judge, examines his characters with a powerful analytic intelligence as they awaken to see what they have lost by self-deception.

THE FOURTH HAND. By John Irving. (Random House, $26.95.) The protagonist of this novel loses one hand to a circus lion, but on balance the encounter seems profitable, leading toward occupational sobriety and the love of a good woman who imposes her moral priorities on him.

FURY. By Salman Rushdie. (Random House, $24.95.) In the first of Rushdie's novels to be set squarely in New York, a dapper Cambridge professor from India who is also a successful deviser of television puppets participates in replays of the creator-creature question and denounces a good many things that he sees in America.

GABRIEL'S STORY. By David Anthony Durham. (Doubleday, $23.95.) Fifteen years old and black in the post-Civil-War West, the hero of this keen first novel is as outside as an outsider can be; he has every qualification for the self-sufficiency that enables the classic confrontations of cowboy, Indian and nester.

THE GARDENS OF KYOTO. By Kate Walbert. (Scribner, $24.) An elusive, eloquent first novel whose plot moves back and forth in America, Paris and Japan, as its narrator, a woman coming of age in the 1950's, construes the past in a way that obscures some uncomfortable facts but never involves her in emotional dishonesty.

GETTING A LIFE: Stories. By Helen Simpson. (Knopf, $22.) Unsentimental, stylistically playful, acutely observed British stories featuring two victim classes: women who sacrifice their lives for their children, and career women who rarely see the kids except on weekends.

THE GLASS PALACE. By Amitav Ghosh. (Random House, $25.95.) A morally and psychologically complicated novel that examines the frequent deceptions and self-deceptions of India's Anglicized elite, a tribe deliberately created by Britain to think and act Britishly, still going strong after 50 years of independence.

GLUE. By Irvine Welsh. (Norton, paper, $14.95.) Imbued with the quality of oral epic by the argot of the Edinburgh pubs and projects, this novel follows the growth to middle-aged dissolution of four boyhood friends whose only limitless prospect is for self-destruction.

GOATS. By Mark Jude Poirier. (Talk Miramax/Hyperion, $22.) When the hero of this first novel, a 14-year-old straight-A stoner from Tucson, goes east to a fancy prep school, he leaves behind not only his infantile New Age mother but also his surrogate father, a handyman who tends the flatulent bovid ruminants of the title.

THE GOOD GERMAN. By Joseph Kanon. (Holt, $26.) The deepest considerations of right and wrong pervade this novel about an American journalist searching for his prewar lover in the ruined (and harrowingly described) Berlin of 1945, where everything is for sale and experience with rocket weapons commands a very high price.

THE GRAND COMPLICATION. By Allen Kurzweil. (Theia/Hyperion, $24.95.) A librarian whose life strategy depends on rules and compulsions acquires and then escapes a peculiar benefactor and his obsessions in this engaging, multilevel novel.

HAUSSMANN, OR THE DISTINCTION. By Paul LaFarge. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A novel that invents fanciful variations (including a peculiar love affair with a foundling) on themes from the life of the great city planner Georges Eugène Haussmann, who tore up a still medieval Paris, beginning in 1853, and transformed it into the light-filled city it is now.

HONEYMOON: And Other Stories. By Kevin Canty. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.) Elliptical, impressionistic short stories, in a style at once tender and telegraphic, featuring characters who do the wrong things for the wrong reasons; for starters, in the first story Godzilla declares his love for Tokyo.

HONEYMOONERS: A Cautionary Tale. By Chuck Kinder. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A production by a close friend of Raymond Carver that projects Carver's alcoholism and profligacy, and even some of his well-known short stories, onto a character called Ralph Crawford in a sort of eulogy à clef for a great American writer.

HOTEL HONOLULU. By Paul Theroux. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) "Fawlty Towers" goes darkly Hawaiian in this comic novel, in which the author uses the grotesque denizens of the title hostelry to explore the exoticism of ordinariness -- or is it the other way around?

THE HOTHOUSE. By Wolfgang Koeppen. Translated by Michael Hofmann. (Norton, $23.95.) A masterpiece of German literature, first published in 1953 and now in English, about an honest politician attempting to rebuild postwar Germany.

HOW TO BE GOOD. By Nick Hornby. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A surprisingly sentimental novel in which a British physician's snarling husband falls under the influence of a faith healer and embarks on the venture of transformation to goodness, perhaps excessive goodness.

THE HUNTER. By Julia Leigh. (Four Walls Eight Windows, $20.) A moody first novel that follows an obsessed Australian hunter in his effort, undertaken on a mission for a biotech company, to find and kill a Tasmanian tiger, a beast as fierce as the hunter himself but believed extinct since 1936.

THE HUNTERS: Two Short Novels. By Claire Messud. (Harcourt, $23.) The first, titled "A Simple Tale," intensely and compassionately written, illuminates the deadly bleak life of an old woman whose luck failed her repeatedly; the second concerns a tenant in a London flat who fears his neighbor may be a mass killer.

I CANNOT TELL A LIE, EXACTLY: And Other Stories. By Mary Ladd Gavell. (Random House, $21.95.) The inevitable losses between mothers and children are at the heart of these subtle, polished stories, whose author died at 47 in 1967, when ladies still approached their goals by indirect means.

IN CUBA I WAS A GERMAN SHEPHERD. By Ana Menéndez. (Grove, $23.) A collection of wise, painful stories about the Cuba in Miami and the Miami in Cuba, after 40 years of what is neither migration nor exile but a condition of joint obsession for those who never left and for those who did.

INSPIRED SLEEP. By Robert Cohen. (Scribner, $25.) An elegant, witty novel whose protagonist is a struggling 39-year-old single mother and adjunct professor whose gravest need is just a little sleep; she gets it, eventually, through involvement with a not particularly scrupulous experimental sleep laboratory.

IN SUNLIGHT, IN A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN. By Kathleen Cambor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A sober, indeed stoical, novel, incorporating class conflict and observing the personal and emotional reticence of the 19th century, set in Johnstown, Pa., in the year a flood morally attributable to rich people upstream killed more than 2,000 of the less rich.

IN THE FLOYD ARCHIVES: A Psycho-Bestiary. By Sarah Boxer. (Pantheon, paper, $15.) A smart, droll, original series of interconnected cartoons in which a Mr. Bunnyman is psychoanalyzed by Dr. Floyd in a universe that drifts, dreamlike and inexorable, in parallel with the real history of Freud and his cases; by a reporter for The Times.

ISLAND: The Complete Stories. By Alistair MacLeod. (Norton, $25.95.) The small but highly concentrated output of 33 years' work, all of it dealing with life in Nova Scotia, where generations of hardship and authenticity, once stubbornly borne, are on the cusp of yielding to prosperity, education and cultural impoverishment.

THE JOURNEY HOME. By Olaf Olafsson. (Pantheon, $24.) This novel's heroine, a tough woman who has been running a hotel in England for 20 years, returns to her native Iceland, keeping a diary in which a lifetime's grave issues burble up; the author, vice chairman of Time Warner Digital Media, wrote the book in Icelandic, then Englished it himself.

KISSING IN MANHATTAN. By David Schickler. (Dial, $21.95.) Eleven linked stories that seem to come from an ancient world of happy endings; die-hard romantic strivers seek redemption from their ordinary problems in the dark whirl of a mythical city, some of them in the Preemption, a gargoyle-encrusted apartment house dominating the Hudson at 82nd.

THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES AT LITTLE NO HORSE. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $26.) A beguiling novel that takes place in Ojibwa country in North Dakota and centers on the innocence of Father Damien Modeste, a wilderness priest who lives for a century and is really a woman.

THE LECTURER'S TALE. By James Hynes. (Picador USA, $25.) A full-blown academico-Gothic farce, in which a self-effacing white male who loves books acquires the mysterious power to make people do whatever he wants; this faculty he employs against a Midwestern English department full of theorists and freaks.

LIGHT ACTION IN THE CARIBBEAN: Stories. By Barry Lopez. (Knopf, $22.) A distinctive and often lovely sampling of Lopez's recent short fiction, characterized by his belief that rewards come to the respectful explorer.

LIGHTNING FIELD. By Dana Spiotta. (Scribner, $23.) A first novel, placed in a film-settish Los Angeles, by a satirist whose central character is a defiant walker in Four-Wheel City; she prefers in-between places and is more likely to be en route to somewhere than to arrive to meet her husband or lovers.

LITTLE AMERICA. By Henry Bromell. (Knopf, $24.) A novel that examines American involvement in the Middle East in 1958 through a C.I.A. officer who makes a close friend of a king who resembles Hussein of Jordan; the narration is highly polished, and the rendering of the era is exact.

LONG TIME NO SEE. By Susan Isaacs. (HarperCollins, $26.) The Long Island housewife-sleuth Judith Singer, now a widow and a professor, does the work of a whole homicide squad when a fellow dweller in Singer's trenchantly observed suburbs is made dead.

LOVE, ETC. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $23.) Barnes's ninth novel continues the adventures of "Talking It Over" (1991), exhibiting the further ups and downs of two nearly young men and the woman they both love; like other Barnes folk, they have the habit of addressing the reader, sharing secrets other characters don't know.

MARTYRS' CROSSING. By Amy Wilentz. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) This first novel by a former New Yorker correspondent in Israel seeks to explore the conflict there by pursuing the consequences of a fateful, unintended incident at a highway checkpoint and the lives of the Palestinian mother and the Israeli soldier involved.

MORE STORIES FROM MY FATHER'S COURT. By Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Autobiographical in spirit, these stories, first published in Yiddish in the 1950's, revivify the lost world of childhood as well as the culture of traditional Judaism and the stresses wrought on that culture by the early 20th century in Poland.

MR. MEE. By Andrew Crumey. (Picador USA, $25.) A good-humored, intelligent, very up-to-date novel whose narrators, like physicists, shape reality by observing it; its title character, an awesomely naïve English scholar, buys a computer on whose screen the darnedest things show up.

MY DREAM OF YOU. By Nuala O'Faolain. (Riverhead, $25.95.) A big, generous, old-fashioned novel in which a middle-aged, emotionally repressed travel writer returns to her native Ireland to confront not only her own history but that of her country.

MY LITTLE BLUE DRESS. By Bruno Maddox. (Viking, $24.95.) A first novel in the form of a self-referential sendup of a memoir that seems to poke fun at just about everything but does so with a hearty good cheer.

MY NAME IS RED. By Orhan Pamuk. (Knopf, $25.95.) An intricate, engrossing novel in which ideas about reality and its representation, and about the ways in which change is caused or registered, precipitate as passion, hate, heresy and the murder of two artists in the court of the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th century.

NIAGARA FALLS ALL OVER AGAIN. By Elizabeth McCracken. (Dial, $23.95.) In this novel styled as a memoir, Mose Sharp -- straight man in the comedy team of Carter and Sharp, famous long ago -- reviews his career and its encounters with time and history in a kind of vaudeville picaresque.

A NURSE'S STORY AND OTHERS. By Peter Baida. (University Press of Mississippi, $25.) A posthumous collection of short stories with characters who confront the ethical questions of everyday existence; the author's compassion lay in illuminating the issues rather than giving pat resolutions.

PARADISE PARK. By Allegra Goodman. (Dial, $24.95.) Goodman's heroine and narrator, Sharon Spiegelman, spins from New Age fixes to variations on the old-time religions in a single-minded search for enlightenment and ecstasy; the fringes of possibility are expanded by the novel's setting, mostly multicultural Hawaii, where the author grew up.

THE PEPPERED MOTH. By Margaret Drabble. (Harcourt, $25.) The driven, thwarted and not hugely likable woman at the center of this memoirlike novel, which takes as its central conceit the biological concept of matrilineal descent, is modeled on Drabble's own mother.

A PERFECT ARRANGEMENT. By Suzanne Berne. (Algonquin, $23.95.) A probing, intelligent venture into family life today, in which falsehoods multiply miraculously as a young professional couple of up-to-date styles and opinions yield their children to a nanny who knows how to see what she wants to see and tell people what they want to hear.

PERFECT RECALL: New Stories. By Ann Beattie. (Scribner, $25.) Eleven sparkling stories from the prime student and expositor of the narcissistic, educated, white upper middle class on the East Coast and the complications of its kinship structures.

THE PERSIAN BRIDE. By James Buchan. (Houghton Mifflin, $23.) A novel both epic (it spans the last quarter-century in Iran) and romantic (love, in a specially "selfless and fatal" Persian version, drives the events), in which an innocent Englishman's year of marital bliss with an Iranian woman is followed by years of painful travail.

POEMS 1968-1998. By Paul Muldoon. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) Thirty years of work by the dazzling, elusive (and allusive) 50-year-old Irish master of indirection, suggestion, diversion and surprise who is a professor of poetry at Princeton and the Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

THE PRACTICAL HEART: Four Novellas. By Allan Gurganus. (Knopf, $25.) Well, some of them are more like memoirs than novellas. The title story, about a woman who got herself painted by Sargent, is an elusive Jamesian affair; there's also a coming-out story, a ditsy ramble from a preservationist journal and "Saint Monster," about a boy who unwillingly destroys his father.

P.S. By Helen Schulman. (Bloomsbury, $23.95.) In this novel a lonely 38-year-old woman is reunited with a high school boyfriend who is dead and reincarnated. Through this invention, Schulman makes room for a charming exploration of personal rediscovery.

THE RACKETS. By Thomas Kelly. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A well-paced, violent thriller by a veteran of the construction trades who ably gathers Mafiosi, union officials and the feds in a large, engaging portrait of street-level New York that captures the lives of hard men, made so by hard work.

THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP. By John Wray. (Knopf, $24.) An extraordinary first novel, set in rural Austria in the 1930's; Wray, an American of Austrian descent, extracts from the Nazi-era eclipse of reason a kind of fictional meditation on the fate of the individual confronted by fascism.

THE RISING SUN. By Douglas Galbraith. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) Galbraith's first novel, set in the late 17th century, offers a perfectly convincing version of what now seems one of history's nuttier schemes: the attempt by a Scottish expedition to colonize the isthmus of Darien (now called Panama).

THE ROYAL PHYSICIAN'S VISIT. By Per Olov Enquist. (Overlook, $26.95.) A fast-paced historical novel ringing with the clash of ideas, set in the Danish court in the 1770's, when the young King Christian VII was dominated by his German physician, a fan of the French Enlightenment who tried to transform Denmark into a land of liberty, equality and fraternity; by a veteran Swedish novelist and playwright.

SAILING ALONE AROUND THE ROOM: New and Selected Poems. By Billy Collins. (Random House, $21.95.) Clean, suburban, antiseptic, humorous poems by the new poet laureate of the United States. Death, longing and regret figure in his work, but only at the margins; the heart remains funny.

THE SAME SEA. By Amos Oz. (Harcourt, $24.) A lucid, transparently playful novel about sexual hanky-panky involving a man and his son and several women in contemporary Tel Aviv and Katmandu; the author himself steps in, perhaps to flirt with us. And most of the book is in verse. (The author collaborated on Nicholas de Lange's translation.)

THE SAVAGE GIRL. By Alex Shakar. (HarperCollins, $26.) A wild first novel about a young woman who has moved to Middle City and taken a job with a trend-spotting visionary who sees a perfect product in diet water.

SCHMIDT DELIVERED. By Louis Begley. (Knopf, $25.) Begley's adroit novel of manners boldly renders Schmidt, his unlikable, rich, bigoted, defiant, aging protagonist (whom we have seen before in "About Schmidt"), with the same humanizing fullness other authors save up for nice people.

SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE OF PAUL CELAN. Translated by John Felstiner. (Norton, $29.95.) Felstiner, author of the biography "Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew," has worked for more than two decades on these respectful translations, gathered from all periods of the poet's life.

SINGING BOY. By Dennis McFarland. (Holt, $25.) The mystery that follows the murder at the beginning of this novel lies not in the crime but in the struggles of the victim's survivors -- wife, son and best friend -- to find ways to go on living, resolutions of heart and mind that will let them find words for themselves and for one another.

SISTER INDIA. By Peggy Payne. (Riverhead, $24.95.) Estelle, the ferocious 400-pound protagonist of this unsettling novel, lives in what isolation she can find in teeming Varanasi, India, with an awful sin in her past that she tries to keep out of her mind; once it is released, a kind of deliverance -- but no easy out -- becomes possible.

SKIRTS AND SLACKS: Poems. By W. S. Di Piero. (Knopf, $22.) Di Piero, a translator and critic as well as poet, speaks conversationally but with concentration of loss, displacement and ordinary life, whether in personal relationships or in a kind of celebration of the run-down South Philadelphia of his childhood.

SLAMMERKIN. By Emma Donoghue. (Harcourt, $24.) A colorful, romping novel based on the real life of an 18th-century Englishwoman, a London prostitute at 14, who so loved pretty clothes that she did terrible deeds to get them. ("Slammerkin" means both "loose gown" and "loose woman.")

THE SOUTHERN WOMAN: New and Selected Fiction. By Elizabeth Spencer. (Modern Library, $23.95.) Stories whose heroines -- girls and women, wives and spinsters, usually belonging to the families who run affairs in Southern small towns -- seem to have been born worldly, shrewd and resourcefully witty.

SPUTNIK SWEETHEART. By Haruki Murakami. (Knopf, $23.) Murakami's seventh novel to be translated into English concerns a beguiling, bohemian young woman, a male narrator who pines for her, and the woman she secretly, desperately loves; a sexual approach leads to a disappearance that defies rational explanation, but maybe not irrational.

THE STORIES OF PAUL BOWLES. (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $39.95.) Ruthlessly unsentimental shorter fiction written from 1946 to 1993; most of it is set in the Muslim world, where Bowles lived, and inspects Muslim experience and sensibility along with the Western fascination with exotic people.

THINKS . . . By David Lodge. (Viking, $24.95.) The action in Lodge's most structurally complex novel so far is an affair between a swaggering, jet-setting academic star and a professor of creative writing who is trying to get over her husband's untimely death.

THREE APPLES FELL FROM HEAVEN. By Micheline Aharonian Marcom. (Riverhead, $23.95.) A vivid first novel depicts the sufferings of the Armenians during World War I; one character, an American consul, wonders, as the reader is meant to do, why such cruelties are so little noted by the world.

TO THE HERMITAGE. By Malcolm Bradbury. (Overlook, $27.95.) This posthumous novel addresses the question of posterity's treatment of writers; on an academic junket to St. Petersburg, a Bradburyish character proposes that authors never really die and their works continue, as a remarkable discovery in Russia confirms.

TRANSFIGURATIONS: Collected Poems. By Jay Wright. (Louisiana State University, cloth, $59.95; paper, $24.95.) Virtually all the works of this brilliant, original poet whose verse is charged with both learning and reflection, considering both roots and voyages (born in New Mexico, Wright has lived in New England for 25 years now).

TRIESTE AND THE MEANING OF NOWHERE. By Jan Morris. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) An account both personal and historical of the heterogeneous corner of Italy that attracted James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Morris herself, partly because of the pleasurable melancholy she calls "the Trieste effect."

THE TWO HEARTS OF KWASI BOACHI. By Arthur Japin. (Knopf, $26.95.) A rich, spacious and humane first novel, set in the 19th century, by a Dutch writer whose protagonist, an Ashanti prince from the Gold Coast, is more or less taken hostage in the 1830's and compelled to live out his life in an exile that places no value on a black man.

UP IN THE AIR. By Walter Kirn. (Doubleday, $23.95.) This novel concerns a 35-year-old career transition counselor -- that is, he tells people they are fired -- whose obsession it is to acquire one million frequent flier miles and who cheerfully inhabits an alien universe he calls Airworld.

WHAT REMAINS. By Nicholas Delbanco. (Warner, $24.95.) A tender novel composed of the memories of a single family, Jewish escapees from Hitler's Germany to Britain and then America; with little plot or narrative, the book deploys interlinked lives the reader may enter into, and returns repeatedly to particular memories and accumulated family lore.

THE WHITE MAN IN THE TREE: And Other Stories. By Mark Kurlansky. (Washington Square/Pocket Books, $23.95.) A sophisticated novella and some wicked, merry stories set in the Caribbean basin and concerning the misunderstandings, misjudgments and missed connections between people separated by race, culture or anything else; the author's first book of fiction (he's a newspaper person).

WHY DID I EVER. By Mary Robison. (Counterpoint, $23.) In Robison's first novel for a decade, Monica Breton (known as Money) has three ex-husbands she can't quite remember and two children she loves immensely but can't figure out how to help; she defends herself, painfully, with wit and irony, Ritalin and lots of rules for living.

WINTER JOURNEY. By Isabel Colgate. (Counterpoint, $23.) With a sneaky humor and a frank delight in her characters, the English novelist depicts a sexagenarian brother and sister who meet for a few days in the country.

THE WOODEN SEA. By Jonathan Carroll. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $23.95.) This intellectually diverting novel by an American expatriate based in Vienna crosses from fantasy to science fiction to psychological thriller as it confronts its hero with a dead but teleporting dog, doubles of himself at various ages and other alarming things.

THE WORLD BELOW. By Sue Miller. (Knopf, $25.) The grasp of this ambitious novel stretches to seven generations; the narrator, an up-to-date twice-divorced mother, hears in her grandmother's journals the voice of a simpler time, and recognizes the weight and power of the pastoral impulse, valuable however much it is recognized as a simplification.

YEAR OF WONDERS: A Novel of the Plague. By Geraldine Brooks. (Viking, $24.95.) Authentic, affecting calamities (misery, murder, torture, suicide, mass death, like that) multiply in this historical novel set in a microcosm of society in extremis, an English town that quarantines itself in 1665.

ZIGZAGGING DOWN A WILD TRAIL: Stories. By Bobbie Ann Mason. (Random House, $22.95.) The characters in these stories tend toward detachment and excessive simplicity, but they regret their limitations and sense both the opportunities and the perils of the world beyond the sprawl of the mid-South; the craftsmanship of Mason's minimal observations is as diamond-sharp as ever.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

AMBER WAS BRAVE, ESSIE WAS SMART: The Story of Amber and Essie Told Here in Poems and Pictures. By Vera B. Williams. (Greenwillow/HarperCollins, $15.95.) (Ages 7 and up) A story of sisters who live all alone, hidden in plain sight among the adults who care for them. Latchkey children, the girls are plucky and resilient. The book is a timely reminder about the generosity and strength of children's spirits.

BALONEY (HENRY P.). By Jon Scieszka. Illustrated by Lane Smith. (Viking, $15.99.) (Ages 5 and up) Henry, a young green alien, invents an excuse for being late for school that is peppered with words from more than a dozen languages and takes him into outer space. The retro-stylish and wacky illustrations keep pace with the text.

FAIR WEATHER. By Richard Peck. (Dial, $16.99.) (Ages 10 and up) A rich relative asks the Beckett family to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It's part family story, part tall tale, awed and affectionate.

FOUR IN ALL. By Nina Payne. Illustrated by Adam Payne. (Front Street, $15.95.) (All ages) In a poem using only 56 common nouns, the illustrator has found a story that grows in complexity with each rereading as a little girl sets off on a dream journey.

A GIFT FROM ZEUS: Sixteen Favorite Myths. By Jeanne Steig. Illustrated by William Steig. (Joanna Cotler/Harper-Collins, $17.95.) (All ages) The stories are woven together into one seamless tale in which the prose is fresh and charming, the occasional verses inspired and the illustrations spectacular.

LOVE THAT DOG. By Sharon Creech. (Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins, $14.95.) (Ages 8 to 12) The free-verse journal of a reluctant boy whose teacher, Miss Stretchberry, is introducing poetry to her class. She uses some classic texts and he comments on them. As a novel it is more of a haiku than a sonnet and yet it creates a substantial, fully imagined world.

MARTIN'S BIG WORDS: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By Doreen Rappaport. Illustrated by Bryan Collier. (Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, $15.99.) (All ages) Key phrases from King's early life have been used as markers in telling a simplified story of his life, illustrated as a magisterial drama. The effect is reminiscent of the work of both Jacob Lawrence and Romaire Bearden.

OLIVIA SAVES THE CIRCUS. Written and illustrated by Ian Falconer. (Anne Schwartz/Atheneum, $16.) (Ages 3 to 7) The plump piglet tells her classmates how she saved the circus. It's an elaborate tale involving amazing skill and strenuous exercise, and she says it's "pretty all true."

A STEP FROM HEAVEN. By An Na. (Front Street, $15.95.) (Ages 10 and up) A first novel that is a familiar immigrant story with Korean details but universal resonances; its central character is Young Ju, who watches her parents' troubled marriage disintegrate even as the children adapt to America.

WOODY GUTHRIE: Poet of the People. Written and illustrated by Bonnie Christensen. (Knopf, $16.95.) (All ages) This beautifully illustrated account of the folk singer and songwriter concentrates on the Great Depression and celebrates the song "This Land Is Your Land" as both an anthem and a call to action.

MYSTERIES

BAD NEWS. By Donald E. Westlake. (Mysterious/Warner, $23.95.) This priceless crime caper takes the disaster-prone burglar John Dortmunder to upstate New York, where he and his gang of goofs team up with some out-of-state con artists on an outlandish scheme to bamboozle two Indian tribes out of a piece of their casinos.

EXILE. By Denise Mina. (Carroll & Graf, $25.) The beaten-down women at a Glasgow shelter are used to taking abuse from the drunken men in their lives; but when one of the women ventures outside the shelter and is murdered, a young social worker is drawn deeper into the domestic war zone where the cycles of violence begin -- and never seem to end.

THE FINAL COUNTRY. By James Crumley. (Mysterious/Warner, $24.95.) "I'm old, babe, but not dead," boasts Milo Milodragovitch, a reprobate P.I. from Wyoming who finds himself in Texas hill country on a payback mission, mixing it up with an exuberant cast of double-dealing men and two-faced women in artfully choreographed bar brawls and gunfights.

HOSTAGE. By Robert Crais. (Doubleday, $24.95.) In this criminally entertaining illustration of chaos theory, three young punks invade the home of "Mr. Smith," a nerdy accountant who turns out to have enough underworld juice to bring out local sheriffs, California state troopers, the F.B.I. and the mob for a suburban standoff that spirals out of control.

THE HUNTSMAN. By Whitney Terrell. (Viking, $25.95.) The dangerous friendship between an angry black youth and the rebellious daughter of a Kansas City judge leads to murder in this lyrical first novel, whose fluid time frame and shifting narrative voice offer an intimate look at the complex kinships of people who define themselves by their regional ties.

IN A STRANGE CITY. By Laura Lippman. (Morrow, $24.) The Baltimore sleuth Tess Monaghan is on hand when the mysterious figure who visits the grave of Edgar Allan Poe each year on his birthday is joined by a second Poe Toaster who is murdered on the spot, necessitating a witty survey of local legends surrounding the father of the American mystery story.

MYSTIC RIVER. By Dennis Lehane. (Morrow, $25.) In this wrenching study of how a crime in the neighborhood can bring down the entire community, a savage murder in a working-class section of Boston forces three former friends to return to an earlier crime and relive the exact moment when the world of their boyhood lost its innocence.

OPEN SEASON. By C. J. Box. (Putnam, $23.95.) In this sinewy first novel set in the Bighorn Mountains, the author articulates his concern for endangered lives and liberties in the laconic voice of Joe Pickett, the new game warden of Twelve Sleep County, Wyo., and a stand-up guy who isn't intimidated by poachers, survivalists, or his own preternaturally smart child.

OVER TUMBLED GRAVES. By Jess Walter. (Regan Books/HarperCollins, $25.) If every city gets the serial killer it deserves, Spokane, Wash., is stuck with a creep who preys on prostitutes who ply their trade along the river -- a lonely place that attracts the kind of people who have always lived on the edge of the water, condemned to dead-end lives.

THE SHAPE OF SNAKES. By Minette Walters. (Putnam, $24.95.) Haunted by guilty memories of her role in the murder of a black woman with Tourette's syndrome, a British schoolteacher uses newspaper clips, police reports and personal letters to narrate the cruel event and to force her biased neighbors to acknowledge their own complicity.

SCIENCE FICTION

THE CHRONOLITHS. By Robert Charles Wilson. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $22.95.) In novels like "The Divide" and "The Harvest," Wilson has produced one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary science fiction. "The Chronoliths," in which a man tries to turn his life around in a world stunned by the arrival of colossal monuments from the future, is among his best.

DANCE OF KNIVES. By Donna McMahon. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $25.95.) This ambitious first novel, set in a 22nd- century Vancouver much altered by an unspecified "Collapse," brings together a naïve young woman and a deadly, brain-damaged human "tool" in a wrenching twist on the old tale of Beauty and the Beast.

THE GHOST SISTER. By Liz Williams. (Spectra/Bantam, paper, $5.99.) An anthropological puzzle story in the mode of Ursula K. Le Guin. Explorers from a neatly tamed "Gaian" world discover that communing with nature can mean something quite different on a planet whose inhabitants, under the influence of what they call the "bloodmind," become predators in rapturous rapport with their environment.

THE LAST HOT TIME. By John M. Ford. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $22.95.) In an America greatly changed by the re-emergence of magic, a young paramedic falls in with a Chicagoland gang of humans and elves headed by the enigmatic Mr. Patrise. Although the narrative takes the shape of myth, Ford keeps the focus on a love story as touching as it is surprising.

LOOK TO WINDWARD. By Iain M. Banks. (Pocket Books, $23.95.) Set in a far-future, multi-species galaxy rife with hope and despair, this sophisticated space opera deals artfully with the appeal of terrorism and the necessary dangers of a free society.

NEKROPOLIS. By Maureen F. McHugh. (HarperCollins, $24.) A slow-paced, tightly focused novel about the search for love in all the wrong places. Hariba, a 26-year old woman who chooses the life of a brain-controlled servant over freedom, falls for an artificially bred humanoid who, though programmed to please all true humans, can only feel close to his own kind.

PAVANE. By Keith Roberts. (Del Rey Impact, paper, $12.95.) What better choice to begin a new series of quality reprints than this classic alternative-history novel, first published in 1968 and set in a 20th-century England that reverted to Roman Catholicism after the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I? Roberts evokes this imaginary time and place with a persuasive attention to detail and an irresistible narrative sweep.

RETURN TO THE WHORL. By Gene Wolfe. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $25.95.) A weighty addition to Wolfe's far-future epic about faith and its consequences. To understand it, readers should be acquainted with at least some of the earlier volumes in his Long Sun series. As fine a writer as science fiction has produced, Wolfe demands a lot from his readers, but here, as always, it's worth meeting him more than halfway.

SHIP OF FOOLS. By Richard Paul Russo. (Ace, paper, $12.95.) A heady blend of religious allegory and first-contact puzzle story. Having lost sight of their original mission, the inhabitants of a self-sufficient starship break into bitterly opposed factions. An encounter with an alien vessel forces everyone to confront the age-old question: how can evil exist in a divinely ordered universe?

TALES FROM EARTHSEA (Harcourt, $24) and THE OTHER WIND (Harcourt, $25). By Ursula K. Le Guin. In these two books, one of science fiction's most acclaimed writers returns to Earthsea, a world of islands where magic is as familiar, and dangerous, as science is in our world. The five short tales, all new, deepen the portrait of Earthsea that Le Guin sketched out in earlier novels. In "The Other Wind," a new novel, Le Guin takes a hardheaded look at the efforts of Earthsea's contentious peoples to live together.

VENTUS. By Karl Schroeder. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $27.95.) Nothing is what it seems on Ventus, a planet that has been transformed into an Earth-like "paradise" by nanotechnology. On a world where everything is, in some sense, alive, why are humans barely tolerated? While more-than-human powers contend for control of Ventus, a handful of humans, often working at cross-purposes, try to avert a tragedy of cosmic proportions.

WILD SEED. By Octavia E. Butler. (Warner Aspect, paper, $13.95.) First published in 1980, this mesmerizing tale combines traditions of African and African-American storytelling with a keen understanding of biological and evolutionary imperatives. An important work of modern science fiction by the only science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.