Paperback Writers

It may seem, thanks to her ManBooker Prize winning novel 'Wolf Hall' (just out in paperback, Picador: 608 pp., $16), that the novelist Hilary Mantel needs no more attention; but in fact the large body of her work — and she's been publishing for more than 25 years — remains largely unknown, and unread, in this country. "Wolf Hall" inhabits the life of Thomas Cromwell, the man who wrote and rammed through the laws that created the English Reformation, enabling Henry VIII to ditch his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn.

Guilt was Patricia Highsmith's great theme. In her books even the good know they're not innocent, and they carry an apprehension that they too will be found out. "Night was falling quickly, with visible speed like a black sea creeping over the earth," reflects Robert Forester at the beginning of "The Cry of the Owl" (Grove: 272 pp., $14), one of her lesser-known works from 1963 and one of her most unsettling. Which is saying plenty. Forester is driving through the woods of Pennsylvania, about to do something he knows he shouldn't.

First published in 1974, John le Carré's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (Penguin: 400 pp., $16) deals with the quest to ferret out a double agent within the highest levels of the British secret service. The novel's plot weaves together a backward-looking investigation, drawing in the testimony of witnesses, case files and detailed memories, while moving swiftly forward toward danger, pursuit, entrapment and resolution. In his introduction to this edition, Le Carré reveals that in its earliest drafts he tried to make the story move without flashbacks.

Many memoirs, and some of the best, are survival stories, tales told by that supposedly fortunate person who emerged living but not unscarred from the carnage of natural disaster or personal tragedy. Survival comes with a price tag: Not only must the survivor move forward, but he or she must assess his or her position vis-à-vis what occurred. That is what Brooke Hayward does in her classic memoir "Haywire" (Vintage: 329 pp., $16 paper), now reissued more than 30 years after its original publication, with an introduction by Buck Henry and a new afterword by the author.

Many memoirs, and some of the best, are survival stories, tales told by that supposedly fortunate person who emerged living but not unscarred from the carnage of natural disaster or personal tragedy. Survival comes with a price tag: Not only must the survivor move forward, but he or she must assess his or her position vis-à-vis what occurred. That is what Brooke Hayward does in her classic memoir "Haywire" (Vintage: 329 pp., $16 paper), now reissued more than 30 years after its original publication, with an introduction by Buck Henry and a new afterword by the author.

Bruce Chatwin, the brilliant English writer and stylish nomad, died from AIDS in late 1989. His memorial service, held in a Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London on the day that Ayatollah Khomeini handed a death sentence to Chatwin's friend Salman Rushdie, was a legendary event, mobbed by fans, celebrities and hundreds of journalists. Chatwin was by then a cult ? admired as much for his self-mythologizing persona and the values of independent scholarship and lonely questing that he seemed to represent as for his clipped, lapidary prose.

The handwritten pages of James Boswell's " London Journal 1762-1763" languished forgotten in a trunk in Scotland before being brought to light in the middle of the last century and issued under the auspices of Yale University. This event, together with publication of successive hordes of newly discovered Boswell material, at last separated him from Dr. Samuel Johnson, in whose large and overbearing shadow he had lingered after writing his biography, and established him as a personality in his own right.

Paula L. Woods reviews "Still Waters: A Mystery" by Nigel McCrery. Elisabeth Vincentelli reviews "Don't You Forget About Me," a novel by Jancee Dunn. Tim Rutten reviews "Still Alive!: A Temporary Condition" by Herbert Gold. Fred Schruers reviews "Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right and the Culture Wars" by Thomas R. Lindlof. Brett Levy reviews "Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge," edited by Damien Broderick. Dick Lochte reviews "Shadow of Power: A Paul Madriani Novel" by Steve Martini.

Brian Moore was born in Northern Ireland, immigrated to Canada and spent much of his life living here in California, in Malibu. He wrote scripts, short stories and a string of novels, many of which, like "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne," "Black Robe" and "The Statement," were turned into films. He worked with Alfred Hitchcock on "Torn Curtain," an experience Moore memorably described as "like washing floors." Moore never quite left his Irish behind and was never without his admirers, winning praise from Joan Didion, Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith, among others.

William Lindsay Gresham's novel "Nightmare Alley" (NYRB Classics: 288 pp., $16) tells the rise-and-fall story of Stan Carlisle, a hustling carnival wanna-be who transforms himself into the Great Stanton, a big-time stage magician, and then into a fake psychic, running a "spook racket" before reaching too far and engineering his own catastrophe. In the end, Carlisle is torn apart by the very same emotional disturbances that have driven him, let down by a woman who loves him and betrayed by another who is even more ruthless than he. The "nightmare" of the title rings true, for this delirious and unstoppable novel -- first published in 1946, famously filmed starring Tyrone Power in 1947 and only now re-issued by NYRB Classics in its full, uncensored version with a new introduction by Nick Tosches -- inverts the American dream.

Bruce Chatwin, the brilliant English writer and stylish nomad, died from AIDS in late 1989. His memorial service, held in a Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London on the day that Ayatollah Khomeini handed a death sentence to Chatwin's friend Salman Rushdie, was a legendary event, mobbed by fans, celebrities and hundreds of journalists. Chatwin was by then a cult ? admired as much for his self-mythologizing persona and the values of independent scholarship and lonely questing that he seemed to represent as for his clipped, lapidary prose.

The handwritten pages of James Boswell's " London Journal 1762-1763" languished forgotten in a trunk in Scotland before being brought to light in the middle of the last century and issued under the auspices of Yale University. This event, together with publication of successive hordes of newly discovered Boswell material, at last separated him from Dr. Samuel Johnson, in whose large and overbearing shadow he had lingered after writing his biography, and established him as a personality in his own right.

Black Mask, the great pulp fiction magazine, was launched by H.L. Mencken in 1920 but really started to come into its own some six or seven years later under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw, who would in time publish almost the entire pantheon of classic hardboiled American crime writers: Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Lester Dent, Fredric Brown, Cornell Woolrich and so on. The list goes on and on. But Shaw's...

It may seem, thanks to her ManBooker Prize winning novel 'Wolf Hall' (just out in paperback, Picador: 608 pp., $16), that the novelist Hilary Mantel needs no more attention; but in fact the large body of her work — and she's been publishing for more than 25 years — remains largely unknown, and unread, in this country. "Wolf Hall" inhabits the life of Thomas Cromwell, the man who wrote and rammed through the laws that created the English Reformation, enabling Henry VIII to ditch his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn.

In 1939, with Europe already sinking into World War II, 46-year-old Henry Miller left Paris, knowing that a cycle of his life had come to an end. As an expatriate in Paris he'd found his voice, and published the novels — "Tropic of Cancer," "Black Spring" and "Tropic of Capricorn" — which made his name. He'd had his legendarily steamy and dangerous affair with Anais Nin, and George Orwell had fired a salute on his behalf, hailing him as "a Whitman among the corpses." Miller, although banned in America, had arrived, and then, restless as ever, he accepted the invitation of another writer, his friend Lawrence Durrell, to visit Greece and the island of Corfu.

David Foster Wallace's novel "The Broom of the System" takes place in a Cleveland suburb which has been planned so that, from the air, it resembles the head of Jayne Mansfield. The movie actress and sex symbol died in a car crash in 1967 — decapitated, according to urban legend. So why shouldn't that once-gorgeous head become a model for playful city planners and a future distraction to airline pilots whizzing over the Midwest? That was the idea that occurred to an aspiring young fiction writer, then still an undergraduate at Amherst College.

Alan Sillitoe, now in his 80s, grew up in Nottingham, in the English midlands, in the kind of squalor and poverty that, a century earlier, gave Charles Dickens nightmares. Sillitoe's father was a violent drunk; his mother, on occasion, was forced to prostitute herself. The family, constantly fighting to stay one step ahead of debt and rent collectors, was often on the move, dodging from one squalid tenement to the next, wheeling their belongings in a hand-cart. An abiding memory of his childhood, Sillitoe has written, was of his father raising his fist and his mother pleading: "Not in the face."

"The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die," Kurt Vonnegut once said, sounding more amused than worried about it. Ever the realist, ever the stoic, ever the cynic, Vonnegut got how the lit game works. Reputations soar, tumble into the trash and rise mysteriously again. The good news is that quality tells in the end; and so here we are, 2 1/2 years after Vonnegut's death, celebrating new books and handsome reprints by a man who, by the time he passed on, had been a part of the liberal furniture for so long ("counter-culture icon," proclaimed the New York Times obituary)

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died in New York on Nov. 9, 1953, at age 39. Already a celebrity, Thomas was turned into a legend. Did he die as a result of 18 double whiskies drunk neat in the White Horse Tavern? Or was the cause half a grain of morphine (enough to lay out a horse) administered by an incompetent physician? Did another doctor really say that the poet was dying of "a serious insult to the brain"? Reports conflict, myth balloons. Thomas' put-upon physique took several days to finally give up its ghost, time enough for hundreds to flock to the doors of his hospital ward, to pay their respects, perhaps, or to glimpse the roaring boy in his ruin, and for his glamorous and equally tempestuous wife, Caitlin ( Uma Thurman and Lindsay Lohan are among the actress who have down the years been slated to play her, in bio-pics that — this being the story of a great love, and Dylan Thomas — always seem to fall apart at the last minute)