Fiction

RACHEL'S CHILDREN -- Harriet Hassell--- Harper ($2.50). The Biblical story of Joseph fitted to a family of Southern landowners, bossed by a tyrannical widow whose eventual insanity gives the story its faint echo of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. A first novel by a 26-year-old Alabama coed, a Story magazine prize winner of last year.

MAN'S COURAGE -- Joseph Vogel -- Knopf ($2.50). Written with a straight left, with humor and talent also, this story of a powerful, slow-but-sure-witted jobless Pole is by the author of At Madame Bonnard's, who looks like the best bet among present proletarian novelists.

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK -- Vladimir Nabokoff -- Bobbs-Merritt ($2.50). The European psychological novel of moral decay, represented at its best by the novels of Andre Gide, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, is now eclipsed by politically-minded fiction. Sharply reminiscent of such psychopathic fiction, but with an acuteness that raises it above mere imitativeness is Laughter in the Dark, first English translation of a Russian exile. The story tells of a respectable, middle-aged Berlin art dealer who deserts his family for a tart, reaches its climax of corruption when, after he is blinded, she carries on a silent affair under his nose with a degenerate cartoonist.

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