Angela's Ashes.

I recommend two books of short fiction, a memoir, and a study of the biological determinants of history. Not exactly light reading, but perhaps something to settle down with after returning from the shore.

An easy sort of joke would link Kafka to the supermarket tabloids and produce headlines like "Bureaucrat Wakes up as Roach." In a book of related short stories, Tabloid Dreams (Holt, $12, 288 pp.), Robert Olen Butler plays this joke backward, starting with (probably) invented screamers as titles - for example, "Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband," "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," and "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis" - and then burrowing into the first-person sensibilities that inhabit these fantasies. The expected hilarity gives way to surprising dimensions of longing, a funhouse-mirror elucidation of the urge that draws us to the tabloids in the first place. Liberated in these cut-rate fantasies, our desires and fears achieve unearthly clarity and intensity, but not fulfillment. This is clearest in two stories (the first and last) about ghosts from the Titanic and one about JFK secretly visiting the auction of Jackie O's property at Sotheby's.

Richard Ford's collection of three novellas, Women with Men (Knopf, $23, 272 pp.), confirmed for me the impression made by his wonderful 1995 novel Independence Day. Though the title seems to promise otherwise, these three stories are told from the viewpoint of men, and they share with Independence Day a concern with the responsibilities entailed by close relationships. In the first and last of the stories, American men, facing the onset of middle age and a gathering conviction of their own mediocrity, seek in Paris some effortless translation into something, distinguished and new. In the process they use women badly, thoughtlessly, with dreadful consequences. They are, to speak plainly, first-class jerks, and yet Ford steadily avoids irony in his treatment of them and makes us take them seriously. The middle story, "Jealousy," is the most mysterious and is still unfolding in my mind. Here, the character who makes bad use of another person is a woman, and we see her through the eyes of the book's only first-person narrator, her seventeen-year-old nephew. Estrangements define all these characters. They embrace, press faces together, only to sense the boundary of skin that separates them. They make then' most daring affirmations over long-distance telephone. At close quarters, in a metaphor that works its way through all three stories, something is lost in translation.

Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes (Scribner, $25, 364 pp.) has been widely praised, and I need not add much to what has been said already. Besides the appalling misery of his childhood in Limerick and the terrible luck that gave him a drunken wastrel for a father, the book's most striking quality is the sharpness with which it recaptures the language of childhood. Words first come to us wrapped in a penumbra of unshared connotation. The voices that first spoke them, the places where we first heard them, even the smells that attended them all stick to their semantic core. Their relative scarcity makes each carry more meaning, like a musical theme. As they are joined by reinforcements, as they share out their weight of meaning, their semantic range narrows to the denotations that we carry beyond the family, the playground, and the neighborhood. McCourt recaptures the lost, musical density of childhood language, and it redeems the sadness of his story.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton, $27.50, 480 pp.) addresses the riddle of European world conquest, particularly since 1492. Racist colonialism credited this to inherent ethnic and cultural superiority. Diamond argues instead that the civilizations that originated in the "fertile crescent" of Southwest Asia, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers join, were simply dealt a winning hand of domesticable crop and animal species that led to food production. Food production (supplanting hunting and gathering) was the first specialization, and it made possible all the others, including complex technology, bureaucracy, and armies. Moreover, these unique advantages arose in the one great land mass whose longer axis was East-West rather than North-South, favoring their easy proliferation through a substantially uniform Mediterranean climate.

The book's most humbling lesson is that the white European crushed the original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia not with wit or force of arms, but with the germs that he first inhaled from the cattle and pigs he lived (even slept) with for ten millennia and then exhaled into the faces of natives who had never developed immunities. Diamond is a professor of physiology at UCLA, and the book's cumulative force and clarity of design show the hand of a brilliant lecturer.

Daniel M. Murtaugh is associate professor of English and director of writing programs at Florida Atlantic University.