RED IVY, GREEN EARTH MOTHER <i> By Ai Bei translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (Gibbs-Smith: $10.95) </i>

The four stories in “Red Ivy, Green Earth Mother,” Ai Bei’s first work to be translated into English, paint a harsh, unflinching picture of women’s lives and roles in China that is very different from the tales of vague, unhappy marriages and urban anomie in contemporary American fiction. In “Green Earth Mother,” a young bride finds herself engaged in a power struggle for her husband’s affections with her smothering mother-in-law. Setting “Red Ivy” in a women’s prison enables Bei to describe the social injustice, corruption and vice that flourish beneath the veneer of party rhetoric and ostensibly democratic institutions, in a rare vision of people caught in the clash between feudalistic traditions and governmental efforts to move a society into the modern era.