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\"A definitive biography of the iconic American architect, Louis Kahn\"-- Provided by publisher.

Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities.Music for Silenced Voiceslooks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a \"diary, the story of his soul.\" The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works. Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience,Music for Silenced Voicesis a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.

A number of [Paul Theroux]'s previous novels could well have been called ''My Secret History.'' This title accurately conveys the tone of ''Picture Palace,'' in which a famous septuagenarian female photographer looks back on her long public career and thinks about her extremely private and unrequited passion for her brother. It also applies to the novella ''Half Moon Street,'' whose sleek Ph. D. economist moonlights as a high-class prostitute. It refers best of all, perhaps, to the variously anarchistic and troubled characters in ''The Family Arsenal,'' Mr. Theroux's updated re-creation of Conrad's novel ''The Secret Agent'' (and, to my mind, Mr. Theroux's masterpiece). The issue of prejudice - of judging people on relatively little evidence, of seeing their flaws writ unfairly large - is central to the novel, so it's not surprising that we're able to bring it into play against [Parent] himself. ''My Secret History'' has the courage of tactlessness. It is filled with ethnic and cultural slurs: descriptions of heavy Armenians, greasy Italians, stupid Africans, militaristic Israelis, constipated Britons, cult-following Californians and so on. Sometimes these negative prejudices are counteracted by positive ones -there's a good Italian to cancel out the bad, a good Irish priest to weigh against the idiotic ones - but Mr. Theroux does not feel bound by any Dickensian obligation to balance the scales. [Jenny] calls [Andre] on this, as she calls him on most things: ''It was so cruel,'' she says in response to his lewd remark about some naked Africans in the bush. ''You could have pretended you didn't see anything.'' Andre's best answer on this issue is his defense of another writer, an Indian named S. Prasad, who criticizes, among other things, the uncivilized Pakistanis in London. ''I said nothing,'' remarks our narrator in response to one of these slurs, ''because I knew he was only half serious, and he was at his best when he was allowed to range freely.'' In the world of Mr. Theroux's previous novels, this would be the invitation to doom, the moment when destiny, or coincidence, brings down the curtain on unavoidable tragedy. But ''My Secret History'' does not stem, as Mr. Theroux's other novels do, from the realm of Conrad and Graham Greene; it comes instead from the realm of 1930's screwball comedy. At this moment, when everything hinges on her response, Jenny behaves like one of those tough, smart dames from a Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks movie: she seems to acknowledge and at the same time transcend Andre's terrible misstep, and in doing so she raises the novel's tone to an unforeseen level of freedom and wit. Like those 30's movies, ''My Secret History'' is about the permanence of marriage in the face of mistrust and infidelity; it's about the wisdom of women and the foolishness of men; and it's about mature love as the necessary and sometimes successful antidote to youthful selfishness. If ''My Secret History'' lacks the careful artifice of the author's earlier novels, it nonetheless has a kind of artistry all its own. In it, Mr. Theroux has learned to relax and accept reality with a good grace. A NOVEL GIVES YOU A SECOND CHANCE

There are nice moments in ''Room Temperature,'' thrillingly apt observations of the sort we've come to expect from [Nicholson Baker], as when the narrator refers to his collegiate obsession with grammatical correctness: ''I came home that Thanksgiving filled with evil little ordinances from Sheridan Baker and Words into Type and Strunk & White and that big orange hog-butcher-of-the-world Manual of Style.'' That phrase borrowed from Carl Sandburg not only acknowledges the ''Chicago'' of the style book's official title but also suggests something of the violence, the crudeness, that Mr. Baker is here associating with excessive vigilance in punctuation. I also loved the description of the narrator's father doing a handstand to a Stravinsky record: '' 'Don't go to the end if you don't want to,' I shouted: but even over the penultimate brasses I heard his voice, with the curious Peter Lorre tone that upside-downness imposes on the larynx, reply 'Not long now.' '' Peter Lorre is exactly right here, and his functional inappropriateness (giving us a repressed background image of Lorre sinisterly doing a handstand) is what makes the analogy so hilariously apt.

What this means, in practice, is that the Englishman knows precisely who he is and to whom he's speaking. His pronouns are exact labels applying to a single author (''I'') and a single reader (''you''). This is not to say that the pronouns can't be shared around a bit. In ''The Journey Not the Arrival Matters'' (the final volume of his five-volume autobiography), [Leonard Woolf] writes: ''It is only if you feel that every he or she has an 'I' like your own 'I,' only if everyone is to you an individual, that you can feel as Montaigne did about cruelty. It is the acute consciousness of my own individuality which makes me realize that I am I, and what pain, persecution, death means for this 'I.' '' And [George Orwell], in his essay ''Such, Such Were the Joys . . .,'' describes his childhood bed-wetting as follows: ''There was no volition about it, no consciousness. You did not properly speaking do the deed: you merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were wringing wet.'' In both these statements, the possibility of exchanging positions with the reader comes about by means of, and as a way of demonstrating, a strong sense of self-possession. You can be I and I can be you because each of us possesses that ''acute consciousness'' of our individuality. [Norman Mailer] plays a similar game in both ''Armies of the Night'' and ''The Prisoner of Sex.'' The former explicitly uses the truth-fiction dichotomy in the titles of its two subsections, ''The Novel as History'' and ''History as a Novel''; and in both of them, the main character is always referred to as ''Mailer'' or ''he'' (or, occasionally, ''the Novelist''). In ''The Prisoner of Sex,'' that central character is first an unnamed ''he,'' then ''the Prisoner'' (of War, of Wedlock), ''the Prizewinner'' (as Mr. Mailer imagines getting the Nobel), ''the Author'' and finally - on page 22, in a quotation from another writer - ''Norman Mailer.'' The implication of all this fancy footwork is that Mr. Mailer is a creature defined from the outside, whose existence depends largely on how others see him; he lacks, in this sense, that ''acute consciousness of my own individuality'' that Leonard Woolf is so proud of. The paradox makes psychological sense: the seemingly arrogant, vain Norman Mailer lacks a strong sense of self; the modest, quiet Woolf possesses one. Orwell now strikes me as a bit too detached, especially in comparison with such gently self-revealing writers as [J. R. Ackerley], [Christopher Hitchens] and [Thom Gunn]. There is something disquieting about the insistent, impervious clarity of Orwell's prose. ''Good prose is like a window pane,'' he once wrote, but for an autobiographer his is too much so: it is a window with no distinct face looking out. The Orwell of ''The Road to Wigan Pier,'' ''Down and Out in Paris and London,'' ''Homage to Catalonia'' and the autobiographical essays is a moral, sympathetic, admirable man; but, aside from a few personal quirks - like his aversion to filth - we know almost nothing about him. He is his sentences, he has been subsumed into his paragraphs, and the ''I'' and ''you'' who populate his pages live purely in those pages. To the extent that he is human, he is all of us. One could say the same of Shakespeare, so my expression of dissatisfaction is not intended as literary critique. Rather, it simply marks Orwell's failure to meet us on the terms promised (or at least implied) by the autobiographical enterprise: to reveal something of himself to us.

''Distant Relations'' and ''The Old Gringo'' that [Carlos Fuentes] is imaginative, intelligent, well read and politically thoughtful. One might even have guessed that he is witty. But what we could not know, until reading the essays in ''Myself With Others,'' is how absolutely charming he is. This is recognizably the Carlos Fuentes of the novels: the birth date is the same as that of ''Fuentes,'' the narrator of ''Distant Relations,'' and the movie reference fits right in with the dedication of ''The Hydra Head,'' ''in strict order of disappearance,'' to Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Claude Rains. But beyond that, this opening paragraph introduces us to the paradoxically divided man who comes through in these essays: a citizen of the world who is rooted in Latin American culture, a Mexican diplomat's son who never lived in Mexico until the age of 16, a voracious reader and proponent of high culture who passionately loves the movies and a left-leaning political observer who carefully and delicately situates himself between East and West. He has a similarly removed perspective when speaking about Mexico (''the imaginary, imagined country, finally real but only real if I saw it from a distance'') and, above all, about himself. Of his first novel, he remarks, ''I myself feel about it like Marlowe's Barabbas about fornication: that was in another country, and, besides, the wench is dead.''

In contrast to this depressing vision are the extremely moving portraits by John Barth (who describes his wife, a high school English teacher), Houston A. Baker Jr. (who talks about a Howard University literature professor, Charles Watkins) and Max Steele (who praises Mrs. Gilpatrick, the rigorously attentive instructor of advanced composition at Furman University). Since the authors of the essays were selected on the basis of their profession as writers, it is not surprising to find that most of the influential teachers they cite taught English literature or writing. Nonetheless, there are a couple of athletic coaches (George Garrett's ''My Two One-Eyed Coaches''), some historians and philosophers (Alfred Kazin's ''Teachers - and Two Particular Teachers'') and a small sampling of multiple-subject grade school teachers (Elizabeth Spencer's ''Miss Jennie and Miss Willie''). Over all, ''An Apple for My Teacher'' is something less than the sum of its parts. Over half the writers come from the South (the editor, [Louis D. Rubin Jr.], is a specialist in Southern literature), creating the questionable impression that good teaching is done primarily below the Mason-Dixon line. Moreover, the book is slightly disappointing in that its two best essays -Houston Baker's ''What Charles Knew'' and John Barth's ''Teacher'' - have previously appeared in periodicals. However, if you haven't already read them, they alone make the book worthwhile. MR.