Set in a fictitious Virginia county in the antebellum years, this great, Pulitzer-winning novel is a consideration of the wages of slavery and an avowal of the peculiar institution's primacy in the American psyche. Jones, after big game, invents a community in which both whites and well-to-do blacks own slaves. (Some free blacks in the South did own slaves, though never in the concentration portrayed here.) The result is a supremely humane, supremely just book about the slave-owning South and American history.  (USS379, $24.95)