Viking Penguin Inc

It is best to mention a painter, but obliquely, not too early, say, in the fourth line, as in: She had a face like a Cezanne still life-- disproportionate, overpainted, painstakingly orderly; to reveal, slowly and subtly, your erudition, your eclectic intelligence, your love of the natural world.

April 14, 1989, marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Viking Press, which published the original edition, is publishing an anniversary edition ($25; 619 pp.) with an introduction by Studs Terkel. Penguin, the paperback half of Viking Penguin, Inc., offers a quality paperback edition ($9.95) and a mass market edition ($4.95) of that landmark novel by the only Californian ever to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Not surprisingly, this anniversary year has also brought a small crop of books about Steinbeck.

Iran's president said Friday that Salman Rushdie, the author of "The Satanic Verses," might save his life with an apology, while an Iranian envoy said his nation's death penalty for the writer was "purely a religious statement." "If the purely religious-based opinion of a religious head is going to be interpreted politically, it is very unfortunate," said Akhoond Zadeh Basti, Iran's charge d'affaires in London.

Pre-dawn firebombs hurled through windows Tuesday damaged two Berkeley book stores, one a literary and political landmark whose owner had vowed publicly to resist Islamic pressure to stop selling "The Satanic Verses," as violence apparently broke out around the Salman Rushdie novel.

MORE THAN MEN, I think, women share important memories as tokens of their love. One recollection so given me was of a small girl watching her father making macaroni and cheese. His method was a loving ritual of sustenance. The ingredients were prepared and mixed in a large, heat-proof mixing bowl, which was then set directly in the oven and periodically removed during cooking for further incorporation of a precisely gauged amount of additional cheese.

Darcy O'Brien, a college professor and author of several fiction and nonfiction books, was in Europe last summer when he was urgently summoned back to New York by his publisher. It seemed that there was a problem with his about-to-be published book, "Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers," the first full-length account of the investigation and trial of the men who had terrorized Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978 with a series of brutal sex murders.