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THE WOMEN, by T. C. Boyle (Penguin, $16.) Love, not architecture, is the focus of Boyle's novel about Frank Lloyd Wright. Boyle views his protagonist through the lens of his messy relationships with women and divides his story into sections corresponding to Wright's major romances. In the Book Review, Joanna Scott praised the novel as a ''powerful new chapter'' of Boyle's ''hilarious and terrifying fictional history of utopian longing in America,'' a ''mesmerizing story of women who invest everything, at great risk, in . . . Wright.'' THE MERCY PAPERS: A Memoir of Three Weeks, by Robin Romm. (Scribner, $13.) This ''furious blaze of a book,'' as our reviewer, Leah Hager Cohen, described it, explores Romm's anguish over her 56-year-old mother's impending death from breast cancer. Romm writes with ''fresh and uncompromising'' prose, ''fearless, scathing honesty'' and magnetic anger, Cohen said. Death also shadows Diana Athill's SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END: A Memoir(Norton, $13.95), but she contemplates its approach from the perspective of a long life. A celebrated London editor, Athill, now 92, speaks gracefully and with good cheer about the losses and gains of old age. Life, she concludes, is ''amazingly capacious.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents short reviews of several new and noteworthy paperback books. "Drop City," by T. Coraghessan Boyle; "A Box of Matches," by Nicholson Baker; "A Ship Made of Paper," by Scott Spencer.

A WIDOW'S STORY: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The prolific author has assembled a book more painfully self-revelatory that anything Oates the fiction writer or critic has ever dared to produce. WIDOW: Stories, by Michelle Latiolais (Bellevue Literary Press, paper, $14.95.) While presenting a world wrapped in spiked barbed wire, this collection also contains passages of searing tenderness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]