Random Notes

First Look at October: Diana Trilling edits the work of her late husband, Lionel: The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75 (Harcourt Brace, $9.95). … In The Trouble with Nowadays: A Curmudgeon Strikes Back (Arbor House, $10), Cleveland Amory creates an upper-class, sophisticated version of Archie Bunker, then satirically milks him with democratic glee. Of course Old Curmudgeon is a “male chauvinist, jingoist, dyed-in-the-wool Republican.” … On the fiction side, Irwin Shaw has written what Publishers Weekly considers a dull effort, Top of the Hill (Delacorte, $9.95). . . . Provenance (Little, Brown, $12.95) by Frank McDonald is a racy, elaborate story about international art dealing.

China Trade: With modernization after Mao, China has become a literary growth industry. Mary and Theodore Cross claim to have escaped from organized tours to photograph the people of China in informal poses. Their Behind the Great Wall: A Photographic Essay on China (Atheneum, $25) includes one hundred photos, 15 of them in color. . . . Another rarity, a Chinese personal memoir, will be published by Percy Chen, Maoist and son of Eugene Chen, Sun Yat-sen’s foreign minister. China Called Me: My Life inside the Chinese Revolution (Little, Brown, $15) relates many heroic stories from the Great Proletarian Revolution.

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First Look at October: Diana Trilling edits the work of her late husband, Lionel: The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75 (Harcourt Brace, $9.95). … In The Trouble with Nowadays: A Curmudgeon Strikes Back (Arbor House, $10), Cleveland Amory creates an upper-class, sophisticated version of Archie Bunker, then satirically milks him with democratic glee. Of course Old Curmudgeon is a “male chauvinist, jingoist, dyed-in-the-wool Republican.” … On the fiction side, Irwin Shaw has written what Publishers Weekly considers a dull effort, Top of the Hill (Delacorte, $9.95). . . . Provenance (Little, Brown, $12.95) by Frank McDonald is a racy, elaborate story about international art dealing.

China Trade: With modernization after Mao, China has become a literary growth industry. Mary and Theodore Cross claim to have escaped from organized tours to photograph the people of China in informal poses. Their Behind the Great Wall: A Photographic Essay on China (Atheneum, $25) includes one hundred photos, 15 of them in color. . . . Another rarity, a Chinese personal memoir, will be published by Percy Chen, Maoist and son of Eugene Chen, Sun Yat-sen’s foreign minister. China Called Me: My Life inside the Chinese Revolution (Little, Brown, $15) relates many heroic stories from the Great Proletarian Revolution.