Until now, Pavese's poetry hasn't been available in an English translation that carries both the colloquialness of his language and the haunting rhythms of his verse. Geoffrey Brock's fine new translation has met this need so that, also given the recent reissue of several of Pavese's novels, American readers can have the pleasure of getting to know him in some depth. Brock's translations are faithful to Pavese's tone, even as they usually stay close to the literal meaning. It is an impressive achievement.

-- Andrew Frisardi

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Do Everything in the Dark, A Novel; Gary Indiana; St. Martin's: 276 pp., $23.95

"Do Everything in the Dark" is set in New York, but it is basically a backdrop for a group portrait. There's no conventional "atmosphere." A single sentence is enough to establish the setting: "Sleepwalkers armed with credit cards spilled along the sidewalks, filling outdoor tables of fifth-rate pizzerias and bistros -- the East Village's Kmart parody of Montmartre." And the collective mood is evoked by a list of everything that no longer excites the group, from drugs to hip-hop, sex to meditation, Rolfing to "ever-refined electronic gadgets that seemed to promise some control over the gathering chaos."

As in his earlier novel "Resentment," the lives of Gary Indiana's leading characters are cunningly interwoven, but especially in "Do Everything in the Dark," which is written partly in the omniscient third person and partly in the first, Indiana himself the narrator. "People tell me things," he explains. "I listen. I watch and wait." In a tour de force of storytelling, he creates the effect of being invisibly present at every scene, a self-acknowledged member of a social microcosm "getting older in an age when everybody had seen too much by the time they were thirty-five."

-- Gavin Lambert

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Drop City, A Novel, T.C. Boyle; Viking: 444 pp., $25.95