Love Affair

Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin (Knopf: $13.95) If Laurie Colwin is a warm-water pipe, her metal is as well-tempered and precisely turned as that of her sisters and brothers on the cold-water side of the modern American novel. She handles feeling as cunningly as Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme handle numbness.

Dear Wall Street: Happy Anniversary. But after 10 years, how do we know we're still in love? Better try and count the ways. Exactly 10 years ago today, the bear market of the inflation-ravaged 1970s finally breathed its last. The Dow Jones industrial average bottomed at 776.92 on Aug. 12, 1982. The following day, Friday the 13th, the Dow jumped 11.13 points and the bull market was born--though at the time, of course, few people recognized it.

In the traditional recitation of the seven capital sins, envy is preceded by lust and anger. So, too, in California writer Kathryn Chetkovich's extraordinary essay, "Envy," which appears in the current issue of the London-based literary magazine Granta and already has created something of a minor sensation in Britain. It seems likely to attract even more attention now that it is available in the United States, where the identity of the unnamed object of her jealousy is more easily discerned.

A tangled love affair appeared to be behind the killing of a high-ranking Greek navy officer and his probable assailant, police said. Athens Police Chief Christos Keramidas said documents at the scene indicated rivalry over a woman. The victims, Lt. Cmdr. Spyros Benetatos and his suspected assailant, Ioannis Markevits, a foreign language teacher, were killed by a grenade similar to those used by Greek guerrilla groups.

Marguerite Duras won the $50,000 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award today for "L'Amant," her intense, lyric novel about the love affair she had with a wealthy Chinese when she was 15 years old in French Indochina. Duras, 72, said the Hemingway prize meant more to her than the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary award that she won two years ago, because of its American connections and her "secret passion" for Hemingway.

The co-pilot on a Royal Air Maroc flight sent a distress signal when the pilot directed the plane earthward in a suicide dive that killed 44 passengers and crew, investigators said Thursday. But she was unable to stop her colleague from carrying out his suicidal impulses. "Help, help! The captain is . . . ," co-pilot Sofia Figugui screamed. Her pleas, registered on flight recorders, were cut off, said French aeronautics officials who examined the communication.

In Sunlight and in Shadow A Novel Mark Helprin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 720 pp., $28 -- It's been 17 years since Mark Helprin's last novel, "Memoir from Antproof Case," and he's lost none of his gift for bravura storytelling and lavish prose. Indeed, prose seems too mundane a term for Helprin's extravagant way with words and emotions as he chronicles the courtship and marriage of Army veteran Harry Copeland and heiress/actress Catherine Thomas Hale. Post-World War II Manhattan isn't merely the backdrop for their love affair; it's a magical urban landscape of "whitening sunrises Even when Helprin first won acclaim three decades ago for such early works as "Ellis Island and Other Stories" and the novel "Winter's Tale," his penchant for providing an epiphany on nearly every page could become wearying.

An Air Force captain who disobeyed his commanders' orders to halt his love affair with an enlisted woman was dismissed from the service Sunday and ordered to serve a 15-day prison term. A six-member military jury decided the sentence after prosecutors said Capt. Joseph Belli should serve a year in prison. Belli, 35, pleaded guilty to fraternization, conspiracy and disobeying direct orders. The charges carry a maximum 22-year prison term. Court-martial Maj.

Measuring a love affair by calculating the number of dollars spent on the object of affection is a callous approach to involvement. Nevertheless, it's time to discern whether Americans do purchase chocolate in proportion to their often-stated professions of passion for the confection. Statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Commerce on chocolate consumption and sales indicate that the frequently mentioned romance between consumers and processed cocoa is gaining in intensity.

There may well have been a movie in "9 1/2 Weeks" (selected theaters), a woman's pseudonymous "memoir" of a masochistic love affair that became too dangerous for even her to endure. At its most powerful, it was a disturbing portrait of the obliteration of the self by an all-consuming passion. But to tell that story, you'd have to tell it.