NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH: The Year's Best, 2003. Edited by Shannon Ravenel with a preface by Roy Blount Jr. Algonquin. 368 pages. $14.95 in paper.
In the doldrums, a dose of true Southern discomfort
Here we are then, so deep in the puddled doldrums of July that even such temptations as the ''Eh! What is it to touch thee!'' passage from Lady Chatterley incites only an urgent need for a nap. So no more novels, please. What we crave now is the quick fix of love 'em-and-leave 'em fiction, a bunch of easy-come, easy-go short stories with their economical narratives and bloodcurdling swoops into the illuminating moment, little tales big enough to yank us from our torpor and back into life's syncopated...
( BY MARGARIA FICHTNER, mfichtner@herald.com, 07/27/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

We'll read Holocaust classic for `One Book'
Elie Wiesel's Night -- that devastating account of hermetic, pious childhood in the Romanian village of Sighet and its horrifying end when the Nazis arrived in 1944 -- has been selected for this fall's One Book, One Community reading initiative by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami-Dade College.
( BY MARGARIA FICHTNER, mfichtner@herald.com, 07/14/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

Zadie Smith continues to reflect new hues of England in her follow-up to the acclaimed `White Teeth'
Zadie Smith is a cultural spy, a member of that delectable if maddening subspecies of peepers and eavesdroppers who auto-focus on life's shadowy corners and whispered secrets, senses panning over the soft morning light dappling a bedsheet, the three-day rasp of whiskers on a hangover-slackened jaw, the queasy image of a tongue in a bathroom mirror, the foul mush of a cigarette at the bottom of a Jack Daniel's bottle, the rumple of undershorts just before they are scooped off the floor, sniffed and...
( BY MARGARIA FICHTNER, mfichtner@herald.com, 07/13/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME. Mark Haddon. Doubleday. 226 pages. $22.95.
Bashful Christopher's hot on the trail of a poodle killer
Here, though it hardly constitutes the snuggly comfort of beauty rest, is one of Christopher Boone's favorite dreams: Almost everyone on Earth is dead, killed off by a weird virus contracted through the seemingly innocent act of looking at another person, someone already infected, even someone seen only on television, and by ''the meaning of something an infected person says and the meaning of what they do with their faces when they say it. . . . '' The virus impels its victims to crash their cars...
( BY MARGARIA FICHTNER, mfichtner@herald.com, 06/29/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

Words on the fly
This summer, books take readers to different worlds.
( BY MARGARIA FICHTNER, mfichtner@herald.com, 06/15/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

THE LIGHT OF DAY. Graham Swift. Knopf. 324 pages. $24.
Life comes crashing down when George goes snooping
Well, yeah, babe, maybe they're all over the place here, the hard-luck private eye, the doll in trouble, the messy sex, the gruesome death, the smudgy cops, and all those other tell-tale distinguishing marks of noir, and maybe the whole story pecks out with the hard-knuckle austerity of a 1940s movie script, but Graham Swift's intricately convoluted new novel hinges less on the melodramatic, hard-boiled shock of sudden violence (''There was Bob on the floor in a pool of blood'') than on the tangled...
( BY MARGARIA FICHTNER, mfichtner@herald.com, 05/25/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

Death penalty debate at MDCC's Wolfson Campus
The ongoing debate over capital punishment will take center stage Wednesday at a town hall meeting sponsored by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts of Miami-Dade Community College.
( mfichtner@herald.com, 05/19/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

THE NEARLY DEPARTED OR, MY FAMILY AND OTHER FOREIGNERS. Brenda Cullerton. Little Brown. 220 pages. $23.95.
Daughter of a square peg in a small Connecticut town
Every family has its allotment of eccentrics and loonies, of course, but not even Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie, whose famously documented East Hampton squalor so embarrassed their kinswoman, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, can compete with Brenda Cullerton's terrifically, ah, unusual clan.
( BY MARGARIA FICHTNER, mfichtner@herald.com, 05/18/2003 03:01 AM EDT)