Linda Morris is about to make a major change in her life. She is about to leave her best friend, who is her husband, and to leave her lover, who just may be a contract killer and who is, she suspects, out to kill her, contract or no. She is about to run away with a gorilla. Animal Acts is a quest novel unlike any we have seen before. On the surface, it is an antic tale for our times, the story of a woman of a certain age who runs away from her perfect husband and her dangerous lover only to find that she has unintentionally run away with a full-grown gorilla. On a deeper level, it is an exploration of the human-animal bond: Beginning as a search for self-consciousness, it ends in animal consciousness. En route, it puts a controversial spin on evolutionary theory, producing what can only be called the inevitable next stage in the gender wars. And through it all, Rhoda Lerman - magician, conjuror, word-juggler - persuades us along her manic path.

Panofsky; whose satirical eye for the idiocies of today's Quebec separatists (as well as for every other kind of political correctness) manages to offend his entire acquaintanceship (and will soon be offending readers everywhere); and whose memory - though not his bile - is, in his sixty-seventh year, definitely slipping...

while coping with his own insidious nightmare, has placed himself smack in the middle of theirs. We watch as Hector is pulled into the twister of his friends' trendy but collapsing life, and is tossed and whirled along its crazy itinerary - from Bill's support group (for straight philanderers) to an intime holiday in the Caribbean, just the three of them. As the novel, moving toward reconciliation, culminates in a pastoral extravaganza - a country wedding in which two.

grooms in sky blue promise to love, honor, and cherish - Hector moves from fear through revelation to acceptance of his approaching death.

so. In the Bales-McCord family, two old people are at the point of contemplating their final resting places - Glenn and Laura Bales. Everybody is wondering which one will go first. A third old person looking death in the eye is Uncle Grove McCord, hell-raising, bootlegging, bush pilot, black sheep brother of Glenn Bales's first wife. Grove left Summerlin years ago and has buried several wives. He's got a good healthy one now out in Arkansas. But he pines for Summerlin.

where he was raised and is making his own private arrangements to be buried there. "Hell," he says, "I can't be buried beside all my wives." Clyde Edgerton fans won't be surprised that the characters in his funny new novel end up with too many graves and too few tombstones. It all happens within the space of just a couple of weeks and it's told by everybody involved, from Buster Douglas, the Truck Freight Limited driver who delivers Uncle Grove's tombstone to Wilma and.

Harold Fuller, Visitors-to-the-Sick. Join them as they gather in Summerlin to attend to the business of passing on - and passing down. As Uncle Grove points out, "You're history longer than you are fact."

with him. Filled with allusions to Pound's life and works and written in a style similar to Finnegans Wake, Rios's word-mad novel features the same characters from his first novel, Larva: the poet Milalias, his girlfriend Babelle, and their mentor X. Reis, each of whom writes part of the novel: Milalias writes the Joycean main text, Reis (as Herr Narrator) adds commentary on facing pages, and Babelle furnishes maps and photos. Together, they compile the "Parting Shots"

at the end, dazzling short stories that expand upon incidents in the main text. Sound confusing? No more so than the Cantos, and Rios is much funnier.

To tell it, she enlists the help of Peter Leroy, who loved her when he was a boy. Peter, a master of the art of wishful thinking, uses this book to give to Ariane the gift of a second chance at life, a chance to make herself into the person she might have become.

As she and Peter follow the thread of her bizarre tale, it becomes entangled with several others, including Peter's paternal grandparents' unsinkable devotion to each other, the treachery of a handsome guy named Guy, and the rise of the film director Greg Tschudin, who appropriates Ariane's stories, distorts them, and exploits them.

Told with Peter's compassion and Ariane's passion, her tale takes on the dimensions of a modern fable about artifice and deception, the ownership of our stories, the control of our lives, the making of our selves, what it means to create art, and what it means to be a work of art.

One person after another tries to take control of Ariane's life, to take from her the opportunity to make something of herself, but ultimately she finds a champion who defeats them all, in a magnificent and heartwarming triumph of devotion and imagination over treachery and despair.