Richard Belfield, Christopher Hird, and Sharon Kelly. MURDOCH: The

Great Escape (Penguin, #6.99).

* THIS is an updating of the same team's 1992 book Murdoch: Decline Of

An Empire, and is substantially the same except for the last two

chapters, which describe the with one mighty bound our hero was free

miracle which the Dirty Gold-Digger has since wrought. The facts are

almost incredible, but convincing; the figures are telephone numbers;

and the whole is quite revelatory of how the sometimes financially shaky

Murdoch machine is kept turning by its master's hypnotic brand of snake

oil. Read it and weep, because Rupe's back -- if not bigger, then more

influential and craftier than ever. Why does the world let him away with

it?

Walter Abish. ECLIPSE FEVER (Faber, #6.99).

* HAVING written one novel which was itself a 200-page question, How

German Is It?, Walter Abish turns his interrogatory eye on the

transformation of America from continent into theme park. Set in Mexico,

Eclipse Fever is a complex tale of the appropriation of Aztec art by

rich collectors and of the US's culture-as-commodity mentality spilling

across its backyard -- in the middle of which, cuckolded critic

Alejandro tries to discover a sense of his own heritage unmediated by

white European values. Provocative and witty, Abish's catechistic style

teases out the contradictory relationship between Latin America and its

wealthy neighbour, asking How American Is It? and giving a depressing

and cautionary answer.

Jay McInerney (editor). COWBOYS, INDIANS AND COMMUTERS: The Penguin

Book Of New American Voices (Penguin, #9.99).

* ACCORDING to Jay McInerney in his introduction, the influence of the

Dirty Realists on the American short story was so great that, by the

late eighties, ''the American frontier seemed to be located somewhere

between the kitchen sink and the Hibachi in the backyard. Nature was the

lawn''. While some would argue that this sure beat the insides of

nightclubs filled with preppie nihilists, this anthology of authors

first published in the nineties (including Donna Tartt and William T.

Vollmann) backs up his claim that diversity is once more the rule rather

than the exception. Vistas explored stretch from Native American

reservations to the streets of New York, with Jeffrey Eugenides once

more confirming his status as one of the brightest young things around.