PAPERBACKS.

Byline: The New York Times

``Cruising Paradise: Tales'' by Sam Shepard (Vintage; $12). Consisting of journal entries and conversations as well as narratives, this collection embraces the same harsh landscapes and hardbitten characters that are familiar from the author's plays. ``Here people wrestle with their demons and, more often than not, the demons win,'' Kathryn Shattuck said in The New York Times last year. A biography, ``Sam Shepard,'' by Don Shewey (Da Capo; $14.95), has been reissued as well, with new chapters on Shepard's life and recent work. Focusing on him more as a literary figure than as a film star, the book is ``an illuminating analysis'' of an enigmatic man, Gib Johnson wrote in 1985.

``Catherwood'' by Marly Youmans ( Avon; $10). This novel is written from the viewpoint of a young wife in 17th-century America. Rescued from poverty in England, she travels with her husband to the New World, where she and her baby become lost for months in the forest. ``Youmans's language is trenchant, graceful and, in places, sumptuously archaic, filled with a richness that provides more than just period color,'' reviewer Philip Gambone said last year.

``Rose'' by Martin Cruz Smith (Ballantine; $12.50). The setting is England in 1872, and an Anglican bishop's future son-in-law has disappeared. Jonathan Blair is promised a return to his adopted country on Africa's Gold Coast if he can find out why. This mystery ``is smartly told, engaging and worth reading,'' Eugen Weber said in The New York Times Book Review in 1996.

``Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs'' by Michael Novacek. Illustrated by Ed Heck (Anchor/Doubleday; $14.95). The collapse of communism not only brought down the Berlin Wall, it also reopened the Gobi Desert, an Asian treasure trove of Cretaceous Period fossils. The author, a paleontologist who led a 1990 expedition to the area, ``is a gifted writer,'' James Shreeve wrote in the New York Times last year, who provides ``brilliantly lucid expositions.''

``The Nowhere City'' by Alison Lurie (Owl/Holt; $12). It is Los Angeles (as if you had to ask), and it wreaks unexpected havoc in the lives of Paul and Katherine Cattleman, a young couple who move there in the 1960s after Paul is hired to write a history of a local company. Although he enjoys the atmosphere, Katherine hates everything about it, from the attitudes to the smog. When the novel was first published in 1966 reviewer Martin Levin called it an ``excellent book'' in which the author reveals ``rare understanding.'' The same publisher has also reissued Lurie's first novel, ``Love and Friendship'' ($12), the story of an adulterous affair between Will Thomas, a music professor, and Emily Turner, an English instructor's wife, at an insular New England college.

``The First Elizabeth'' by Carolly Erickson (St. Martin's Griffin; $16.95). She may have been called the Virgin Queen, but this biography shows that Elizabeth I was far from prudish. She used her sexuality, one of the few tools a 16th-century woman could claim, to full political advantage. ``Erickson's Elizabeth is one we need to come to know and are fascinated to meet,'' Maureen Quilligan said in The New York Times in 1983. The same publisher has also restored to print the author's biography of Elizabeth's ruthless father, Henry VIII. ``Great Harry'' ($16.95) is ``skillfully constructed and full of those telling details that are an essential ingredient of the narrator's art,'' Christopher Hibbert said in The New York Times in 1980.

``No Other Life'' by Brian Moore (William Abrahams/Plume; $11.95). Political commitment and the spiritual life rarely meld comfortably, even though both depend on faith. This novel illustrates that conflict through the story of a charismatic priest, who closely resembles Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide, attempting to save his fictional island nation. ``The result is a brilliant meditation,'' Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in The New York Times in 1993.