She flees the city to a rebel camp, where she is imprisoned so that the

The heroine, Alice Achitophel, an obese young woman who threw away the sterilization order when it came in the mail, finds unexpected release from this deathly drabness when she is raped and impregnated. The world after nuclear war is an eternally late November, where female sterilization is compulsory and city dwellers attend to make-work jobs and go home to suppers of cheese, crackers and hot chocolate, with nothing to hope for but the illegal - forbidden - fruit sold by those known as ``rebels.'' Percival Everett's ``Zulus'' (Permanent Press, $19.95) is a post-apocalyptic urban folk tale that plays out the sorry future of the planet. And their scopes are ambitious: respectively, the fate of the planet, the struggle for mental territory in the war between black cultures, and the fortunes of people trying to get past ``Hello'' in the quest for intimacy. Each is wrenchingly intelligent and doggedly humane. But three new books - two novels and a collection of short stories - may rearouse public attention. Endorsed by mainstream feminism, their well-deserved critical success has fueled a corresponding popular success.īy contrast, with the passing of James Baldwin, their male counterparts dangle in relative anonymity. African-American women writers - most notably Alice Walker and Toni Morrison - have long held prominent places in contemporary American fiction.

I Get on the Bus by Reginald McKnight