Books: The Editors Like

THE SUSQUEHANNAby Carl Carmer. (Rinehart, $5.00.) The Susquehanna has flowed through some picturesque history, and Mr. Carmer makes the most of both folklore and battles long ago in the latest volume of the Rivers of America Series.

THE TOWN THAT DIED LAUGHINGby Oscar Lewis. (Little, Brown, $3.75.) Austin, Nevada, exmining but not-quite-ghost town, has, retained through many vicissitudes a lively, frivolous newspaper. Mr. Lewis’s book is largely drawn from the files of this giddy sheet, and it’s pretty funny stuff.

SIG BYRD’S HOUSTONby Sigman Byrd. (Viking, $3.50.) Mr. Byrd is a newspaper columnist specializing in odd local stories, which have now been assembled to make a kind of mulligan-stew portrait of Houston, Texas — sad, funny, fantastic, loving, and sour.

ACT OF GODby Margaret Kennedy. (Rinehart, $3.50.) Satire on small-town society, dilettante jargon, and a disastrous patroness of the arts, in a book which reads as smooth as silk and has an edge like an Arctic tornado.

AUNTIE MAMEby Patrick Dennis. (Vanguard, $3.50.) Never definitely either fact or fiction, the struggles of a sober orphan with his incorrigibly flirtatious and overenterprising aunt are airily amusing.

THE HONOR OF GASTON LE TORCHby Jacques Ferret. (Norton, $3.50.) A swashbuckling comic fantasy about a pleasantly loony Frenchman who dreams or possibly drinks himself hack into the seventeenth century to square the family honor.

THE PLEASURE IS MINEby Mirren Vasili. (Harper, 83.50.) Mr. Vasiliu bolted from the Rumanian diplomatic service because Communism was too tiresome to bear, and his account of his ordeal is probably the most lighthearted tale of woe ever written.

THE MISSING MACLEANSby Geoffrey Hoarc. (Viking, $3.75.) Mr. Hoare, who knew the Macleans, does his best to make sense of the diplomat’s flight into Red territory and of the far more inexplicable departure of Mrs. Maclean months later. A sordid but fascinating tale.

DUEL OF WITSby Peter Churchill. (Putnam, $4.50.) Another cloak-and-dagger reminiscence of the Second World War, full of odd detail and well supplied with action and suspense.

SPIES AT WORKby Ronald Seth. (Philosophical Library, $4.75.) A highly romantic and none too serious history of military snooping and swindling, beginning with the Trojan horse and reaching the present day at a fast clip.