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This representative collection of works by the late Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) brings under a single cover three short novels. The Twilight of the Elephant (II Sempione strizza l'occhio al Fréjus, 1946) is a haunting, mythlike tale bearing strong affinities with music and abstract art. It is the story of a poverty-stricken family and its extraordinary grandfather--a veritable "elephant" of a man. One of the recognized classics of modern literature, In Sicily (Conversazione in Sicilia, 1937) recounts a city man's rediscovery of himself and the basic values of life when he returns for a visit to the primitive Sicilian village where he was born. Included in this edition is an introduction written in 1949 by Ernest Hemingway, who greatly admired Vittorini. The third novella, La Garibaldina (1950), is a vivid portrait of an eccentric old woman, a former camp follower of Garibaldi's army, and her encounter with a young soldier on a night-train journey across Sicily.

Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the "geoglyphic" African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll.

The fabulous beauty of Helen of Troy is legendary. But some say that Helen was never in Troy, that she had been conveyed by Zeus to Egypt, and that Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. A fifty-line fragment by the poet Stesichorus of Sicily (c. 640-555 B.C.), what survives of his Pallinode, tells us almost all we know of this other Helen, and from it H. D. wove her book-length poem. Yet Helen in Egypt is not a simple retelling of the Egyptian legend but a recreation of the many myths surrounding Helen, Paris, Achilles, Theseus, and other figures of Greek tradition, fused with the mysteries of Egyptian hermeticism.

Cynics, says our author, "write books / by Edwin Brock / illustrated by / his wife." Readers already familiar with the wry, sometimes dour work of the British poet Edwin Brock will recall that his wife, Elizabeth, contributed the jacket illustrations to his two previous collections published here (Invisibility Is the Art of Survival and The Portraits The Poses). Now they have combined their talents and complementary satiric visions to produce "A Guide to the Isms." With the biting verse of the one, and the charming, mischievous sketches of the other, Paroxisms prods some of our most cherished sets of ideas. Catholicism, Freudianism, Patriotism, Communism, Capitalism, Surrealism, Eroticism, even the poet's own Cynicism--all are at the receiving end of the Brocks' combined sting.

The publication in 1972 of Invisibility Is the Art of Survival, the author's own selection of poems from earlier books brought out in England, introduced Edwin Brock to American readers. This new collection, The Portraits & The Poses, will further the acquaintance with a fresh and forceful voice, one which David Ignatow has called "the best in English contemporary poetry." These are highly personal poems: the "poses," the postures and bafflements of everyday life as Brock sees it; the "portraits," pithy vignettes of everyday people and their relationships as he knows them. Yet what is personal to the poet is made highly accessible by his art, and by his particular qualities of profound earthiness, honesty, humor, and concern.