Iron & Silk: A Young American Encounters...

Iron & Silk: A Young American Encounters Swordsmen, Bureaucrats and Other Citizens of Contemporary China, Mark Salzman (Random House). “What is remarkable about (this book) is the charmingly unpretentious manner in which it penetrates a China inaccessible to other foreigners” (Carolyn Wakeman).

Almost Japanese, Sarah Sheard (Scribner’s). “A funny and extremely well-crafted divertimento . . . about a Canadian teen-ager’s crush on all things Japanese” (Georgia Jones-Davis).

The Exile, William Kotzwinkle (Dutton/Seymour Lawrence). “A high-level piece of reportage tinted with the wryness of a sophisticated mind that has seen more than enough.” The evocation of the scene in Berlin just before its fall in World War II “is rendered with a sensual immediacy that allows you to smell the grimy cold of Berlin under siege” (Lawrence Christon).

Outside: Selected Writings, Marguerite Duras, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Beacon). A book about warfare between world powers written by “the ultimate foreign correspondent--the correspondent who lives in the mental territory outside nationalism but in the midst of humanity” (Lynn Bundesen).