Biography

Featured in this collection mostly of memoirs and portaits is an excerpt from an unpublished Saul Bellow novel from the 1950s, Memoir of a Bootlegger's Son , set in Jewish Montreal, where the language was ``a French-Russian-Hebrew-British Yiddish.'' Bellow's biographer James Atlas offers an illuminating essay on the Nobel laureate's early career in Chicago and New York. Most other selections successfully avoid standard essay forms. Gabriel Garcia Marquez recalls Frau Frida, a Colombian he met in Vienna whose profession was prophecy. Blake Morrison movingly assesses the life of his dissembling father in a series of episodes. Louise Erdrich, surveying the 1892 rolls of a North Dakota Indian reservation, meditates on a time when ``women wore names that told us who they were.'' Luc Sante, rooting among New York police photo archives, annotates murder scenes from the years 1914-1918. Particularly thoughtful is Lorna Sage's memoir of novelist Angela Carter, who survived an anorexic youth and a desperate marriage to find herself in Japan and create work that was ``unclassifiable in terms of British fiction.'' Photos not seen by PW . (Jan.)