ACCIDENT A Day’s News <i> by Christa Wolf; translated from the German by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $15.95; 112 pp.) </i>

“ ‘Accident’ is an inventory of life, of the cherished dailiness of the mind, body and spirit, and of the lethal absurdity the drifting Chernobyl cloud lays upon all of it. Wolf is a great artist.”