Bookends

THE END OF TRAGEDY

by Rachel Ingalls

Simon & Schuster; 185 pages; $16.95

Rachel Ingalls specializes in refurbishing moth-eaten plots. The four novellas in The End of Tragedy all begin with premises that are numbingly familiar and wind up in ways that seem utterly new and unpredictable. Friends in the Country sends a couple out to a dinner party and deposits them in a sudden fog at what is almost certainly the wrong house, an isolated, spooky Victorian monstrosity; from then on, the mystery evolves into deciding who is crazier, the hosts or the uninvited guests. In the Act is a wickedly funny send-up of android sci-fi, featuring a voluptuous male-fantasy robot (named, naturally, Dolly) who is much nicer than any of the humans around her. In the title story, an actress in a grade-B theatrical company falls for an odd, possibly psychotic lawyer who wants to use her in a complicated revenge and moneymaking scheme. Her only onstage talent is her ability to scream convincingly; at the end, she screams for real but also for a reason impossible to guess beforehand. Ingalls, an American living in London, has built a cult following through her six previous books. This one may draw larger crowds to her spare, skewed, unforgettable visions.

INFORMATION ANXIETY

by Richard Saul Wurman

Doubleday; 356 pages; $19.95

People with a particular talent -- especially a visual talent -- are seldom the best theorists of what they do. Georges Seurat, for instance, was tiresome on pointillism. So perhaps Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who creates the delightfully unorthodox Access guides to cities, should have left it to someone else to explain how people can organize the overflow of data that saturates contemporary life. Information Anxiety is an intermittently diverting self-help guide, Megatrends crossed with What Color Is Your Parachute? But it is more a collage than a book -- with digressive marginalia, diagrams, stray factoids and snatches of autobiography.

Wurman's prescriptions are sound enough: be a good listener, be a contrarian, avoid gratuitous precision, avoid cliches. He also makes some more or less fresh points: that all information is inherently selective and subjective, and that the mind is not an ultra-complicated computer but a place full of unprogrammable and meaningful lapses, quirks and non sequiturs. Yet as he approvingly predicts the proliferation of directories of directories and a new Secretary of Understanding in the Cabinet, Wurman seems to be suffering from Information Giddiness.

RICHARD BURTON: A LIFE

by Melvyn Bragg

Little, Brown; 533 pages; $22.95

Pen pal of Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. A compulsive reader whose idea of a grand evening was to curl up, sober, by a fireplace with a stack of paperbacks. A man who told his famously beautiful wife that the only thing to venerate in life is not love but language. This, surely, is not the Richard Burton of the boozy brawls, the ruined talents, the tossed-away millions on baubles for Elizabeth Taylor, the woman he obsessed over but could not stay married to. Yet both personalities come alive in Melvyn Bragg's meticulous biography. Not many surprises can remain about a man who spent a life in the headlines. But the raw material made available by Burton's widow included letters and 350,000 words of diaries. That unforgettable speaking voice turns out to have been matched by a colorful and trenchant writing voice. This is not exactly Burton's autobiography. But 'tis enough, 'twill serve.

THE WATCH

by Rick Bass

Norton; 190 pages; $16.95

Already this first collection of stories is attracting heavy he-man literary comparisons to Jim Harrison and others. But while Rick Bass, 30, a Southerner who now lives in Montana, can fight the bears with the best of them, there are more unusual reasons to praise him. His writing is so assured that he can do handkerchief tricks on the page. Just try to spot the magic. His characters, mostly country people, along with some layabout Houstoners ("We drank margaritas as often as we could stand it"), are portrayed with rare tenderness; Bass is even tolerant of his blackhearted men. The title story is the most ambitious, a frightening descent into deep Southern swamps. But a dippy little yarn called Mississippi is just as satisfying. It is about a man who loses his girl because . . . well, because, like a horse with a straw hat on, he kept pausing to take in the foliage.