OVERLOOKED TREASURES OF UNIVERSITY PRESSES: A YEAR-END SURVEY

Author: By Bill Marx

Date: SUNDAY, December 28, 1997

Page: L4

Section: Books

So amid publishing feast -- the times have never been better for fiction in translation -- there's cultural famine. Just try finding university press titles in the self-described ``superstores'' or reviewed in the mass media. A New Year's resolution for book lovers should be to put the bookstore chains through their paces -- send a bewildered salesperson from the acres of yard-wide-but-inch-deep shelves to the special order department. Or to frequent an independent bookstore that doesn't pile books on the floor like children's building blocks.

Here's a year-end roundup of university press books worth hunting for, though bear in mind my selection is eccentric, its range narrow in scope. There are many more riches out there, but they are reserved for readers who take the time and trouble to go beyond the convenience of mainstream book business as usual. The effort will reap benefits.

Some of the year's most satisfying fiction came from Northwestern University Press, which over the last decade has launched two fascinating series: ``European Classics'' and ``Writings From an Unbound Europe.'' The former is a quirky hodge-podge of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, boasting a hefty reprinting of works by Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll. Other selections range from Balzac (the terrific ``The Bureaucrats,'' $14.95) to Arthur Schnitzler (a nervy study of anti-Semitism, ``The Road to the Open,'' $14.95) to shards of early Alain Robbe-Grillet (``Snapshots''). More recent volumes include a devastating allegory of totalitarianism, ``The Foundation Pit'' ($12.95), by persecuted Russian writer Andrey Platonov and the ironic folksiness of ``The Sins of Childhood and Other Stories'' ($14.95), by popular Polish scribe Boleslaw Prus.

``Writings from an Unbound Europe'' features a roundup of contemporary prose from such countries as Serbia, Ukraine, Estonia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. While not always as impressive as the celebrated paperback series begun in the late 1960s, ``Writers from the Other Europe'' (whose general editor was Philip Roth), the Northwestern University Press effort deserves congratulations for bringing compelling examples of historically bloodied modernism to the West. Unfortunately, when the Iron Curtain fell, so did our curiosity about the literature of Central Europe, an indifference apparently undisturbed by the recent Balkan conflict.

But much of this fiction is powerful testimony to the imagination under pressure, from Romanian novelist Norman Manea's serenely sardonic ``Compulsory Happiness'' to David Albahari's recently published novella, ``Tsing'' ($14.95), a superb follow-up to his story collection of 1996, ``Words Are Something Else'' ($15.95). Another of this year's crop, Evgeny Popov's ``Merry-Making in Old Russia and Other Stories'' ($17.95), is a humorously grim study of the debasement of Soviet rule. A Northwestern imprint, Hydra Books, also published ``Kaddish for a Child Not Born'' ($22.95), a harrowing study of a Holocaust survivor by the neglected Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz.

John Ciardi, the crusty and unfashionable poet/critic, was well served by the University of Arkansas Press, which not only published ``The Collected Poems'' ($30), edited by Edward M. Cifelli, but also ``John Ciardi,'' Cifelli's excellent biography of the lyricist, translator, and blunt reviewer. ``They are the utterance of a man who wishes to embrace the world with his eyes open, on what seem to him honest terms''; Richard Wilbur's words about his friend apply not only to Ciardi's poems but also to his reviews. UAP should bring together Ciardi's hard-nosed criticism as well. In the meantime, Columbia University Press's ``The Work of Poetry'' ($29.95), a volume of trenchant commentary from poet/critic John Hollander, hits some Ciardi-like notes.

Harvard University Press hopes to popularize German social and literary critic Walter Benjamin, an admirable but no doubt doomed effort given the density of his writing. But the first volume of ``Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings'' ($35), edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, repays the occasional furrowed brow; it also includes a number of pieces translated into English for the first time. Another unconventional critical study, ``Thirteen Ways'' ($20), presents Robert Harbison's sweeping observations on architecture's interactions with culture and history, a work of theory from MIT Press that doesn't neglect the attractions of pleasure and curiosity.

``In the Past Lane'' (Oxford University Press, $35), a collection of essays by cultural historian Michael Kammen, makes provocative points about the practice and ethics of academic history and public financing of the arts. This year the Oxford University Press also launched the Library of Latin America, a collection of heretofore untranslated or hard-to-get fiction and nonfiction from south of the border: Among the initial volumes were ``Don Casmurro'' and ``The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas,'' novels by the Brazilian master Machado De Assis (both $25).

Politics and art meet dangerously in ``Parting From Phantoms'' (University of Chicago Press, $24.95), a controversial collection of interviews, diary entries, and letters from Christa Wolf, one of East Germany's most acclaimed writers. Along with an astute analysis of the cultural and social price of German unification, Wolf answers critics who recently charged that she was an agent for the communist secret police during the Cold War.

The year saw the first English translation of Russian writer Sergei Aksakov's ``Notes on Fishing,'' (Northwestern University Press, $30) a 19th-century volume whose descriptions of nature are worthy of Thoreau. In this country, Aksakov is best known for his memoir ``A Russian Gentleman,'' but in his homeland he is beloved for this collection of tall fishing tales and wry wisdom. In 1998, Northwestern University Press will publish the second volume of Aksakov's trilogy on the outdoors, ``Notes of a Provincial Wildfowler.'' For theater buffs, Michael A. Morrison's ``John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor'' (Cambridge University Press, $29.95) recreates in entertaining detail the relatively brief, but revolutionary, meeting of the Bard and the Great Profile. Bert O. States finds new, un-Freudian things to say about the enigmatic aesthetics of dreams in the suavely written ``Seeing in the Dark'' from Yale University Press ($32.50).

Yale also came out with a volume that will delight the mind and eye. Skillfully edited and annotated by N. John Hall, ``Max Beerbohm Caricatures'' ($45) brings together 213 unflattering but witty images of Victorian literary and political bigwigs, from Yeats, Twain, and Shaw to Disraeli and Queen Victoria. The book is an indispensable homage to the greatest caricaturist of his age.

Finally, Thomas Frank's cultural critique, ``The Conquest of Cool'' (University of Chicago Press, $22.95), shows how advertisers manipulated perceptions of themselves and their wares during the 1970s. The representatives of the Establishment became, in the eyes of the public, fun-loving hipsters, funky salesmen acceptable to rebellious Boomers and, now, Generations X, Y, and Z. Alas, Frank doesn't offer clues to how -- amid the current publishing glut -- good books banished to the margins of marketing can be made cool.