St. Burl's Obituary, and: Generations of Winter, and: Morning in the Burned House, and: Rule of the Bone, and: Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera, and: Painted Desert, and: Name Dropping: Tales from My Barbary Coast Saloon, and: Asian-Pacific Folktales and Legends, and: Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, and: Practical Magic, and: Virginia Woolf, and: Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, and: Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie, and: The History and Power of Writing, and: In the Cut, and: World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth, and: New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 1995, and: Zod Wallop, and: The Hundred Secret Senses, and: Kyrie (review)

Memews^L Il i St. Burl's Obituary by Daniel Akst MacMurray & Beck, 1996, 269 pp., $22.95 Burl Bennett, the main character of this food-obsessed comedy is a three-hundred-pound journalist , restaurant co-owner and wouldbe poet and novelist. He makes his living penning obituaries for the New York Tribune, and in his spare time he labors over his latest writing project, an epic poem about Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. If he's not writing or indulging his passion for food, he's shyly courting Norma, a copy-editor at the paper. Norma likes him and wants to have sex with him, but asks him to lose a hundred pounds first—a goal shared by Burl, who despises his great weight. One evening, arriving at his restaurant, Gardenia's, and anticipating a feast of fried squid and veal saltimbocca, Burl encounters, instead, the aftermath of a gangland killing and comes face to face with the kUler, hit man for a hardto -nail Mafia boss. Burl agrees to testify against the murderer at first; but after his car explodes and a stranger identifying himself as "the Grim Reaper" threatens him, Burl decides to hide. In a cross-country flight that is one long banquet (Burl falls in love with the Midwesfs pies), he heads for Utah, home of the Mormons and settling place of Burl's epic subject, Joseph Smith. Aksfs sharp wit and his Ignatius Reilly-esque protagonist will captivate readers from the opening pages—as will the cast of characters he encounters in his picaresque adventure: Shields, the black detective who is trying to track him down and bring him back to New York so he can testify—or is that really why he's so anxious to find Burl? Frederic, the renowned chef who can make a gourmet meal out of anything Burl brings him; Engel, a gay half-Tongan, half-German, who introduces Burl to one of the few foods he can't stomach: bat; Wanda, a waitress/cult-member who seduces Burl because she wants his seed to help populate her matriarchal cult. The odyssey of Burl's "death" and eventual resurrection is classic comedy, full of shifting identities and offbeat situations, and rude mocking of death. And on almost every page Akst regales us with lavish descriptions of Burl's gourmet meals—which transcend the ordinary , both in the sheer quantity he consumes, and in the sensual fervor with which he eats. Generations of Winter by Vassily Aksyonov translated by John Glad and Christopher Morris Vintage, 1995, 592 pp., $13 276 · The Missouri Review This epic historical novel, originally published in 1994, tells the story of the Gradov family during the Stalin era. The father is a surgeon and an old liberal, the mother part Georgian. The children, like the Karamazov brothers, each take a different fundamental stance toward life. Nina is a poet and a bohemian , Kirill an earnest politico, and Nikita a brilliant military man, married to Veronika, a woman with a weakness for tennis and fine furs. The first half of the novel takes place during peacetime. It is a rare experience to read such a realistic and compelling account—neither propagandistic nor satirical—of the "better" Staun years. The reader is entirely caught up in the developing fates of the Gradovs, determined not only by their personalities and by Stalin, but by the underlying chaos of life. The second half of the book is about World War II, the last in a succession of bitter tragedies to strike the Russians, and the Gradovs in particular. Generations of Winter has been compared to Dr. Zhivago and War and Peace. It's an amazing and eminent novel, kept from the rank of those two classics partly by the fact (evident from Aksyonov's many allusions) that the author is acutely aware of writing in their shadows. Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood Houghton Mifflin, 1995, 127 pp., $19.95 Admirers of Atwood's poetry will find her latest collection (the first in ten years) slim, rushed and loose in comparison to her earlier, more substantial works. Atwood writes of the mortality of beauty and the deterioration of the...