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BEST SELLERS: May 21, 2000


Published: May 21, 2000
(Page 2 of 2)

Rankings reflect sales, for the week ending May 6, at almost 4,000 bookstores plus wholesalers serving 50,000 other retailers (gift shops, department stores, newsstands, supermarkets), statistically weighted to represent all such outlets nationwide. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book's sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (+)indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. Expanded rankings are available at The New York Times on the Web: www.nytimes.com/books.

And Bear in Mind

(Editors' choices of other recent books of particular interest)

DREAMBIRDS: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune, by Rob Nixon. (Picador USA, $23.) Camouflaged as natural history, ode to gawky beauty and social study of precarious empires built on feathers, this book is at bottom a haunting memoir of a South African boyhood.

THE FEAST OF LOVE, by Charles Baxter. (Pantheon, $24.) A luminous he-said-she-said of a novel, in which He, a handsome toadlike man, and She, Ex-Wife No. 1, unspool contrary narratives of their life together.

THE HUMAN STAIN, by Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) The novel's doomed protagonist is a modern converso: a black man passing as a Jew so he'll be taken for white; our old friend Nathan Zuckerman tells his story.

HUNTS IN DREAMS, by Tom Drury. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.) A sequel to ''The End of Vandalism'' set in the same bleak farm community, this novel centers on the ex-vandal, now a plumber (gone straight more from detachment than maturity), as he confronts the breakup of his marriage.

JOHN RUSKIN: The Later Years, by Tim Hilton. (Yale University, $35.) Opening when its subject is 40 and a rising authority on aesthetics, Volume 2 of this vast biography charts Ruskin's unraveling from passionate cataloger (rocks, plants, buildings, paintings, clouds) to tragic obsessive (irrigation, drainage, running water, little girls).

THE MAN WHO WROTE THE BOOK, by Erik Tarloff. (Crown, $23.) Dead-ended at a jerkwater college, the scholar hero of this riotous novel strikes pseudonymous pay dirt as a pornographer: his magnum opus, ''Every Inch a Lady,'' out-Potters Potter and draws a glowing notice -- by Updike yet -- in the very pages you are holding.

THE MANY ASPECTS OF MOBILE HOME LIVING, by Martin Clark. (Knopf, $24.) This first novel by a Southern judge features . . . a Southern judge, who logs overtime as cuckold, bribe taker, treasure hunter and devoted tester of controlled substances but by the end has become a guy worth knowing. (Caveat: Contains one scene in which a certain discomfort befalls two small kitties.)

MEN IN THE OFF HOURS, by Anne Carson. (Knopf, $24.) There is a startling freshness deep down these poems, the work of a writer for whom the ever-sharp world exerts attractive and repulsive forces in equal measure.

NEWJACK: Guarding Sing Sing, by Ted Conover. (Random House, $24.95.) A journalist's account of his year as a correction officer, where his moral well-being was as much at risk as his bodily safety.

SIX FIGURES, by Fred G. Leebron. (Knopf, $22.) The yuppie couple in this novel, no strangers to anger, covetousness and envy, now confront great violence -- and the suspicion that it is home-grown.
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