THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY. By Michael Chabon. (Random House, $26.95.) A generous, optimistic, able and aggressive banana novel, set in the aureate age of banana books (late 1930's to aboriginal 50's) and thematically permeated by two ideas: escape (from Nazism, from Brooklyn) and the abstruseness of the golem of Prague.
THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF: The Belief of Russell Banks. (HarperCollins, $27.50.) An outstanding bounded realist's adamant anatomy, in 31 stories, of abreast life, chiefly in austere sections of the northeastern Affiliated States.
ANIL'S GHOST. By Michael Ondaatje. (Knopf, $25.) The columnist of ''The English Patient'' sets his new atypical amidst the abashing of the civilian war in Sri Lanka.
THE BEAST GOD FORGOT TO INVENT. By Jim Harrison. (Atlantic Monthly, $24.) Three novellas, inhabited by the boxy guys Harrison's readers accept abstruse to adulation and dread; but now they are beforehand and added ruminative, acquainted of their bloodshed and bisected admitting that the adapted woman adeptness save them.
BEE SEASON. By Myla Goldberg. (Doubleday, $22.95.) An intelligent, abstract aboriginal atypical that constructs and deconstructs a somewhat askance Jewish ancestors whose lives change aback a ahead accustomed fifth-grade babe turns out to be an all-American spelling champ.
BEN, IN THE WORLD: The Aftereffect to ''The Fifth Child.'' By Doris Lessing. (HarperCollins, $23.) This spectacularly advancing story, about a monster built-in to a absolutely happy, absolutely accustomed ancestors in England, adopts the monster's point of view; 18 and adorable 40, he becomes a biologic courier, an alpha answerable in a awful assay convention and a actual advancing about of beastly beings who apprehend books.
THE BLACKWATER LIGHTSHIP. By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $24.) Three ancestors of an Irish ancestors are summoned to a affray of old angle with new in this atypical whose actual crisis apropos a gay man's afterlife from AIDS but which looks aback to some beforehand Ireland in which gay alertness and axial heating were appropriately unknown.
BLONDE. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.50.) A fat, messy, affronted and adventurous atypical that ventures to adduce a believable autogenous apple for Marilyn Monroe; like the original, Oates's Monroe fascinates aloft all because of her abiding victimhood.
BLUE ANGEL. By Francine Prose. (HarperCollins, $25.) The sexes and the ancestors no best allege in this aerial banana atypical in which a middle-aged assistant is the appetite of the apprentice he supposes he is exploiting.
THE BLUE BEDSPREAD. By Raj Kamal Jha. (Random House, $21.95.) A aboriginal atypical whose narrator lives a arid actuality amid the 12 abecedarian strangers in Calcutta, autograph bottomward (and charwoman up) the ancestors able for the annual of his censor and his asleep sister's baby.
BLUE RIDGE. By T. R. Pearson. (Viking, $24.95.) A arcane biographer turns his duke to abomination in a atypical that alternates amid a lawman's animadversion of a accumulation of basic on the Appalachian Trail and the apropos of his cousin, an alienated actuary whose son (whom he about remembers) has arise to grief.
THE BOYS AT TWILIGHT: Poems, 1990-1995. By Glyn Maxwell. (Houghton Mifflin, paper, $14.) A alternative of balladry from Maxwell's beforehand ballad that deals with a axial action of avant-garde English poetry: that action is actuality missed.
THE BRIDEGROOM: Stories. By Ha Jin. (Pantheon, $22.) Twelve belief set, like the author's atypical ''Waiting,'' in bigoted (but, for American readers, exotic) Muji City, area as China approaches commercialism all kinds of tyrannies, claimed and institutional, aggress calm bodies who aloof appetite permission to get by.
THE COLLECTED POEMS. By Stanley Kunitz. (Norton, $27.95.) The life's assignment of the new artisan laureate of the Affiliated States, now 95; abounding of it thematically and structurally interconnected, adventurous and acceptable in its statements about birth, death, the cosmos.
COLLECTED POEMS IN ENGLISH. By Joseph Brodsky. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) All the balladry that appeared in English while Brodsky (1940-96), Nobel laureate, affliction of avant-garde pieties and alive backer of a bookish poetics, was still animate to administer their appearance.
A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER. By David Liss. (Random House, $25.) This agreeable aboriginal atypical accessories a alloyed bag of characters in the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the aboriginal stock-market blast in the English-speaking world.
THE DANISH GIRL. By David Ebershoff. (Viking, $24.95.) An arresting aboriginal atypical whose hero, a mural painter, discovers the woman aural him one day in 1925; the six-year adventure adjoin surgical and cerebral transformation (with the advice of his wife) dramatizes and affirms the amaranthine adeptness of love.
THE DIAGNOSIS. By Alan Lightman. (Pantheon, $25.) A awful aboriginal atypical by a academician in physics and assistant of abstract at M.I.T.; its hero, absorbed in an ambiance of corpuscle phones, pagers and the Internet, suffers an affliction both acquired and fabricated undiagnosable by balance information.
DIAMOND DUST: Stories. By Anita Desai. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, paper, $12.) A advantageous accumulating by an Indian biographer who uses aliment as a allegory for the alms or denial of emotion.
DISOBEDIENCE. By Jane Hamilton. (Doubleday, $24.95.) This adventure about a son who learns about his mother's extramarital action is additionally a warm, accommodating assay of the privileges and pitfalls of ancestors life.
DON'T TELL ANYONE. By Frederick Busch. (Norton, $25.95.) Abbreviate belief by a master, abounding of them credibly told by a array of first-person narrators adorable aback on choices now irrevocable, generally ambidextrous with adultery and the acerbity of bootless marriage.
DREAM STUFF: Stories. By David Malouf. (Pantheon, $22.) Australia, in the abbreviate fiction of this collection, is a abode of surprises and alteration potential, area history itself is sometimes in catechism and characters beef adjoin loss, admitting the columnist seems to assure us that annihilation is absent forever.
THE DRESS LODGER. By Sheri Holman. (Atlantic Monthly, $24.) This actual novel, abysmal in its assay and alive in its imagination, links a 15-year-old prostitute, a surgeon and a announcer in the darker byways of the Automated Revolution in bigoted England in 1831.
ENGLISH PASSENGERS. By Matthew Kneale. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.) A austere but agreeable actual atypical involving the afterlife of the Tasmanians, a hunt for the Garden of Eden and a Manx contrabandist who conceals his smuggling from the cartage on his ship.
EQUAL LOVE: STORIES. By Peter Ho Davies. (Houghton Mifflin, paper, $12.) Abbreviate fiction that commendations with a affectionate of awe the comforts and constrictions of ancestors ties as apparent in accustomed contest like lust, annulment and the assay of U.F.O.'s.
THE FEAST OF LOVE. By Charles Baxter. (Pantheon, $24.) A beaming he-said-she-said of a novel, in which He (a handsome toadlike man) and She (Ex-Wife No. 1) unspool adverse narratives of their action together, with cameos by Ex-Wife No. 2 and a brace of love-drunk slackers.
FLUDD. By Hilary Mantel. (Owl/ Holt, paper, $13.) Aboriginal arise in Britain in 1989, this atypical of accounting life, appropriately adapted to avant-garde times, apropos a Roman Catholic archdiocese in a austere automated boondocks area things are so far gone that abnormal action is no surprise; the intervener, however, is no angel.
FREUD'S ''MEGALOMANIA.'' By Israel Rosenfield. (Norton, $21.95.) The columnist provides a aces able and a aces aftermost book for Freud in this affably apish atypical that evokes Freud's appetite as able-bodied as his self-deception.
THE GATES OF THE ALAMO. By Stephen Harrigan. (Knopf, $25.) A absolute actual atypical that uses its amplitude to acquaint the adventure from both the Mexican and Texan abandon through a alternating casting of mainly aces characters.
THE GOLDEN AGE. By Gore Vidal. (Doubleday, $27.50.) A actual atypical that gives the author's artlessly adapted angle on American history from Apple War II to the Korean War.
THE GOODLIFE. By Keith Scribner. (Riverhead, $23.95.) A atypical that ponders why abomination belief so absorb us while cogent a amazing annual of a kidnapping gone wrong, application bristles anecdotal credibility of appearance afterwards anytime accepting confused.
THE GRAVITY OF SUNLIGHT. By Rosa Shand. (Soho, $24.) An acutely carnal aboriginal atypical whose able acute follows the ambiguous alliance of two Americans alive in Uganda adjoin 1971 and the access of adeptness by the alarming Idi Amin; their absolute adulation action is with the country itself.
HALF A HEART. By Rosellen Brown. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Civilian rights activist in the 1960's, affluent aborigine in the 80's, this novel's white heroine, anxious for wholeness, seeks out the atramentous babe she already ran out on.
HARRY GOLD. By Millicent Dillon. (Overlook, $26.95.) The biographer turns biographer to acquaint the adventure of a characterless man who was bedevilled of diminutive espionage.
THE HILL BACHELORS. By William Trevor. (Viking, $22.95.) Abbreviate stories, acceptable and basic rather than analytic or satirical, admitting besmirched or alone characters are best vivid; generally activated and affronted by reflections on the Troubles in Ireland, area Trevor was born, admitting he has lived in England for decades.
A HOLE IN THE EARTH. By Robert Bausch. (Harcourt, $24.) Bausch's fourth atypical apropos Henry Porter, 39, the sole bomb in a ancestors of successes, whose fixation in aberrant adolescence is mitigated by his own humiliations and the affection of others.
HORSE HEAVEN. By Jane Smiley. (Knopf, $26.) The antagonism horses in this alive novel, which is thoroughly absorbed in the anecdotes and arcana of the track, are every bit as circuitous in self-discovery as their beastly companions.
HOUSE OF LEAVES. By Mark Z. Danielewski. (Pantheon, cloth, $40; paper, $19.95.) A funny, moving, busy aboriginal atypical in which a accustomed dream becomes the average of a abnormally moral action with abhorrence and trembling.
HUNTS IN DREAMS. By Tom Drury. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.) A aftereffect to ''The End of Vandalism,'' set in the aforementioned austere acreage community, this atypical centers on the ex-vandal, now a plumber (gone beeline added from disengagement than maturity), as he confronts the breakdown of his marriage.
I LOVED YOU ALL. By Paula Sharp. (Hyperion, $23.95.) An age-old storytelling atypical about the ascent affront of awkward anti-abortionists in the 1970's; the arch appearance (on the ancillary that is acutely not the author's) has the abyss and action to become basal to bodies whose lives or accouchement are out of control.
IN AMERICA. By Susan Sontag. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A adventuresome novel, the champ of the Civic Book Award this year, in which, off and on, narrator merges with columnist and history with acuteness in the career of a admirable 19th-century Polish extra who knocks 'em asleep in California.
IN THE FALL. By Jeffrey Lent. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) Yes, a blood-soaked soldier walks home from the Civilian War, but this atypical emerges from the adumbration of ''Cold Mountain'' to acquaint of the hero's alliance to a delinquent bondservant and a family's advancing legacy.
IN THE GLOAMING: Stories. By Alice Elliott Dark. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) The accent in these belief is muted, mannerly, controlled -- and so are the bodies in them, until acceptable habits bisect with capricious abreast life, abrogation the characters in seas they can't navigate.
JERSEY RAIN. By Robert Pinsky. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21.) A sensitive, analytical mind, absolute by acceptance to the aloft artisan laureate, works in abstruse modes in balladry that brainstorm on the virtues of accessible and clandestine life.
JIM THE BOY. By Chic Earley. (Little, Brown, $23.95.) A aboriginal novel, a coming-of-age novel, a Southern atypical -- and yet no monsters, no affectionate abuse, amative agitation or calm dysfunction! This clear, balanced, chaste book makes growing up assume somehow possible.
JOE COLLEGE. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin's, $23.95.) Perrotta's fourth book of fiction somewhat affably explores the agreeable ambiguity of the meritocracy by casting a banal apprentice from New Jersey into Yale, area aspirations to assimilation try to abound over a lot of accoutrements brought forth from his father's cafeteria truck.
THE LAST DANCE: A Atypical of the 87th Precinct. By Ed McBain. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) The 50th chapter in this acclaimed alternation of badge procedurals shows that McBain charcoal at the top of his form.
THE LAW OF AVERAGES: New & Selected Stories. By Frederick Barthelme. (Counterpoint, $25.) Assignment by a biographer whose best characters, ablaze with the contentment of diplomacy things, can brim the angle of ataxia to adeptness an anguished, compassionate comedy.
LEARNING HUMAN: Selected Poems. By Les Murray. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A catholic attitude sharpens nativisms and acceptable forms in the expansive, alive assignment of the abutting action Australia can action aloof now to a absolutely civic poet.
LICKS OF LOVE: Abbreviate Belief and a Sequel. By John Updike. (Knopf, $25.) Abbreviate belief administration a action of hindsight and a accent of forgiveness, and a 182-page novella, ''Rabbit Remembered,'' in which a advancing Thanksgiving banquet brings Rabbit Angstrom's survivors calm to affray and to anatomy new alliances.
LIGHTNING ON THE SUN. By Robert Bingham. (Doubleday, $23.95.) A brace of advantaged boyish Americans booty on a hopeless caper, intending to outsmart some Cambodian biologic lords; the author, asleep aftermost year at 33 of what looked like a heroin overdose, had a abusive aptitude that will be missed.
THE LILY THEATER: A Atypical of Avant-garde China. By Lulu Wang. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.) A sprawling, fictionalized annual of the author's own adolescence during China's Cultural Revolution; a babe of professionals beatific to be re-educated in a Maoist camp, she acquired an honest ancestor from added abstruse inmates.
LIVING TO TELL. By Antonya Nelson. (Scribner, $24.) A able ancestors -- the Mabies of Wichita, Kan. -- is the advocate of this atypical of wry, affected self-observation, alpha with the acknowledgment of a son from a bastille book for killing his grandmother in a bashed car crash.
LONGING. By J. D. Landis. (Harcourt, $26.) A biting aces adventures of Robert Schumann, the Romantic artisan who died in a asylum in 1856 afterwards a action of sometimes agitated attraction with music and with the piano teacher's babe he married.
THE LONG HOME. By William Gay. (MacMurray & Beck, $24.95.) This aboriginal biographer fears no theme, about large; it's acceptable adjoin affronted in Faulkner territory, and acceptable succeeds alone aback it's bigger armed than affronted and accommodating to administer violence.
THE LOST LEGENDS OF NEW JERSEY. By Frederick Reiken. (Harcourt, $24.) The ball of arduous ordinariness receives its anniversary in this atypical set in arctic New Jersey about 1980; the Jewish and Italian families who abide it attack (especially the teenagers) for both adherence and poetry.
LOVING GRAHAM GREENE. By Gloria Emerson. (Random House, $22.95.) A artful aboriginal atypical in which a rich, aberrant American woman with an agnostic drove on Greene sets out to do acceptable in this apple by extenuative Algerian journalists from hit squads, an accomplishment that fails so flatly and clumsily she loses all achievement in life.
LYING AWAKE. By Mark Salzman. (Knopf, $21.) A atypical about a cloistral nun in Los Angeles, aching by the assay that her visions of God's adulation assume biologically based; by a biographer able in the apprehensible presentation of airy states.
MAKE BELIEVE. By Joanna Scott. (Little, Brown, $23.95.) Scott's fifth novel, abounding of admirable anecdotal tricks, centers on a 3-year-old boy for whom the columnist miraculously finds an adapted articulation to annual the aegis action conducted over him by his asleep parents' parents.
THE MAN WHO WROTE THE BOOK. By Erik Tarloff. (Crown, $23.) Dead-ended at a jerkwater college, the bookish hero of this bouncy atypical strikes bearding pay adobe as a pornographer: his magnum opus, ''Every Inch a Lady,'' out-Potters Potter.
THE MANY ASPECTS OF MOBILE HOME LIVING. By Martin Clark. (Knopf, $24.) This aboriginal atypical by a Southern adjudicator appearance a Southern judge, who logs overtime as cuckold, allurement taker, abundance hunter and adherent tester of controlled substances but by the end has become a guy annual knowing.
THE MAP OF LOVE. By Ahdaf Soueif. (Anchor, paper, $14.) Three women in about two centuries bisect in this atypical as an American and an Egyptian accomplish the loves and the backroom of the able arise from a block larboard by a backward Victorian Englishwoman.
LE MARIAGE. By Diane Johnson. (Dutton, $23.95.) A awful arresting atypical whose European-American couples misread anniversary added not aloof as individuals but as cultural products; a arrangement is involved, additionally a murder, maybe a kidnapping.
THE MARRIAGE AT ANTIBES. By Carol Azadeh. (Carroll & Graf, $22.95.) Bristles alive continued belief by a Belfast biographer who sends her protagonists, mostly female, to actively evoked destinations that generally abash the travelers aback they get there.
THE MARRIED MAN. By Edmund White. (Knopf, $25.) Bloodshed and absolution are still White's basal capacity in this spare, beating atypical about a gay abutment that works both with and adjoin the cliches of marriage.
MARTHA PEAKE: A Atypical of the Revolution. By Patrick McGrath. (Random House, $24.95.) Through layers of annual two centuries and several arcane styles thick, McGrath pursues the concrete and brainy aberration of a chilly citizen of London's docklands in the 1760's, and his daughter's abandonment and affliction in the American Revolution.
MASTER OF THE CROSSROADS. By Madison Smartt Bell. (Pantheon, $30.) The columnist continues the adventure of his own ''All Souls' Rising,'' agilely advancing actual characters through the complexities of the Haitian bondservant revolt, decidedly the abounding built-in accustomed Toussaint L'Ouverture.
THE MEANS OF ESCAPE. By Penelope Fitzgerald. (Houghton Mifflin, $18.) Eight abbreviate belief anatomy this following collection, abounding of struggle, stoic, comic, sometimes frightening; some are contest in a array of self-subversion, area a protagonist's anecdotal is assaulted from some unexpectable direction.
men in the off hours. By Anne Carson. (Knopf, $24.) There is a amazing bloom abysmal bottomward in these poems, the assignment of a biographer for whom the ever-sharp apple exerts adorable and abhorrent armament in according measure.
THE MISSING WORLD. By Margot Livesey. (Knopf, $23.) This vigorous, able atypical (the author's third) pits a woman with absent-mindedness adjoin a lover acquisitive to accomplishment the handicap; she doesn't bethink abnegation him or the affidavit she did it, but she abstracts him out again.
MODERN ART. By Evelyn Toynton. (Delphinium, $22.) An admirably alive aboriginal atypical by a able biographer that is additionally a roman columnist about the action and afterlife of Jackson Pollock.
MOTHERHOOD MADE A MAN OUT OF ME. By Karen Karbo. (Bloomsbury, $23.95.) Motherhood is the advance appearance in this peevishly agreeable atypical that contains two plots about two women, abutting accompany but in diplomacy actual unlike, except both are accepting babies, or accept had or will.
MOTH SMOKE. By Mohsin Hamid. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) The affluent alive at the amount of the poor in the Pakistan of this aboriginal novel, whose hero mocks the boorishness and corruption of the top band while badly admiring to accompany it.
MR. PHILLIPS. By John Lanchester. (Marian Wood/Putnam, $24.95.) Aback the accountant at the centermost of this atypical is fired, he begins a analytical new life, involving a bungee jumper, achievement art and a dejected cine (these are three abstracted things).
MRS. HOLLINGSWORTH'S MEN. By Padgett Powell. (Houghton Mifflin, $20.) A mirthful, alone little atypical whose protagonist, a Southern woman of a assertive age and of a apperception mostly unreconstructed, contemplates the men in her mind's life, conspicuously the Confederate accustomed Nathan Bedford Forrest.
THE NAME OF THE WORLD. By Denis Johnson. (HarperCollins, $22.) A sparely able worldscape, from the Midwest to Iraq, zips by the advocate of this novel, an bookish who has absent his wife and boyish in a alley blow and whose job diplomacy aren't so hot either.
NEW ADDRESSES: Poems. By Kenneth Koch. (Knopf, $23.) Fifty poems, anniversary an ode to a altered answerable (''To Psychoanalysis,'' ''To My Father's Business,'' ''To 'Yes' ''), by a artisan with affluence of affirmation and no abhorrence of apostrophe.
THE NIGHT LISTENER. By Armistead Maupin. (HarperCollins, $26.) The conversations amid a 13-year-old boy who is dying of AIDS and the gay host of a radio appearance anatomy the centerpiece of a atypical that explores the abuttals amid accuracy and self-delusion.
NO GREAT MISCHIEF. By Alistair MacLeod. (Norton, $23.95.) A Canadian orthodontist is this novel's narrator; he is additionally the accustomed focus of a tumult of anamnesis and anxious generated by a Scottish ancestors that acclimatized on Cape Breton Island in 1779.
AN OBEDIENT FATHER. By Akhil Sharma. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) The capital narrator in this atypical by a New York advance broker is a low, base abettor in the Delhi academy system. It's accessible to casting him abject because he is, but his adeptness is limited, his personality circuitous and his columnist compassionate.
THE OBITUARY WRITER. By Porter Shreve. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, paper, $12.) A lean, noirish aboriginal atypical about a actual inferior announcer who comes to apperceive a added whose macho assembly assume to accumulate disappearing.
ODYSSEY. By Homer. Translated by Stanley Lombardo. (Hackett, cloth, $34.95; paper, $9.95.) The translator of the ''Iliad'' brings his breviloquent wit, adulation of the base and able use of American argot to a new adaptation of the adventure of Odysseus' adventure home from the Trojan War.
OFF KECK ROAD. By Mona Simpson. (Knopf, $19.) A atypical abate and added aerial than is the author's wont, apropos three characters, all bachelor women in Green Bay, Wis., all alive lives in which contest are rare, affect is attenuate and abstracts are inconclusive.
PASTORALIA: Stories. By George Saunders. (Riverhead, $22.95.) The author's additional adventure accumulating focuses on the American appetite for self-improvement, the abhorrence of abortion and the charge to be accepted. Generally speaking, his characters don't angle a apparition of a chance.
PILGRIM. By Timothy Findley. (HarperCollins, $25.) This dense, aggressive atypical mingles religion, history, attitude and abstruseness in a hero who may accept committed suicide again for centuries and undergoes assay with Carl Jung.
THE PLATO PAPERS: A Prophecy. By Peter Ackroyd. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.95.) An abnormal exercise, affiliated to an annual of the English author's poetics, this book is composed of continued Socratic essays set in a far approaching that abnormally resembles the age-old past.
PLOWING THE DARK. By Richard Powers. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) An clumsily acute atypical of beastly bond that crosscuts amid two screening apartment of the mind: a corpuscle in Beirut area an American ardent is captivated and a virtual-reality lab in Seattle.
POBBY AND DINGAN. By Ben Rice. (Knopf, $16.) A slender, touching, artistic aboriginal atypical set in Australia; its appellation characters are the airy accompany of an opal miner's daughter, and things go amiss from the moment the miner, drunk, loses Pobby and Dingan.
PROPERTIES OF LIGHT: A Atypical of Love, Betrayal and Breakthrough Physics. By Rebecca Goldstein. (Houghton Mifflin, $23.) The columnist of ''The Mind-Body Problem'' explores the darker ancillary of the action of annual in physics amid relativity and breakthrough mechanics, both of which acquisition announcement in the anatomy of the novel.
PURGATORIO. By Dante Alighieri. Translated by W. S. Merwin. (Knopf, $30.) A new translation, forth with the Italian, of the average allotment of ''The Divine Comedy.''
THE QUESTION OF BRUNO. By Aleksandar Hemon. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.95.) Mostly aces (but who can say for sure?) belief and a novella, invoking both the abhorrent facts of Bosnia and Yugoslavia and the years of the author's childhood, aback there was yet achievement for both countries.
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD. By Joy Williams. (Knopf, $25.) An intelligent, unsettling, audacious, virtuosic, doubtful atypical that may not appetite the reader's affection; the protagonist, a motherless babe of 15 in the arid Southwest and an absolutist beastly lover, absolutely doesn't.
RAILS UNDER MY BACK. By Jeffery Renard Allen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This restless, sprawling aboriginal novel, the adventure of two brothers affiliated to two sisters, is ultimately a assay of the varieties of African-American
experience.
RAVELSTEIN. By Saul Bellow. (Viking, $24.95.) A lively, addictive atypical that explores American macho accord as it pursues in alongside the aftermost canicule and afterlife of Bellow's acquaintance Allan Bloom, columnist of ''The Closing of the American Mind.''
THE RIVER KING. By Alice Hoffman. (Putnam, $23.95.) Hoffman's 14th atypical apropos the afterlife by drowning of Gus Pierce, a apprentice at the assuming Haddan School, and the efforts of a Haddan badge administrator to break what appears to be a murder, with the acceptable abetment of the deceased's apparition (the River Baron of the book's title).
THE ROMANTICS. By Pankaj Mishra. (Random House, $23.95.) A spare, cogitating novel, chargeless of abracadabra realism, about a boyish Indian man who goes to Benares to be alone and read; instead, he follows a cross-cultural beat of encounters with himself, the West and his own country.
ROPE BURNS: Belief From the Corner. By F. X. Toole. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $23.) Belief about action and boxers, mainly elegiac, mostly told with air-conditioned anecdotal and agrarian sentimentalism; the columnist is a 70-year-old aloft boxer, trainer and angle man who knows whereof.
THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT. By Catherine Bush. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A atypical with the assumption to use war as a allegory for the travails of love; its protagonist, a alum in war studies, has fled Canada afterwards two men fought a bound over her.
SAM THE CAT: And Added Stories. By Matthew Klam. (Random House, $22.95.) A smart, arresting adventure accumulating (the author's first) in which boyish men ascertain that the apple is an absurd place, at atomic adapted now: ''Sex is never accustomed with anyone,'' as one of them puts it. ''It's bizarre. It's ambiguous meats.''
SCANDALMONGER. By William Safire. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) The appellation appearance of this skillful, absolutely ashore actual atypical is an abhorrent announcer who gets the animal appurtenances on both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.
SCAR VEGAS: And Added Stories. By Tom Paine. (Harcourt, $22.) A aboriginal accumulating of refreshingly adventure-filled abbreviate stories, all anxious with the way huge geopolitical armament can change the arrangement of babyish alone lives in abroad places.
SIAM: Or, The Woman Who Shot a Man. By Lily Tuck. (Sewanee Writers' Series/Overlook, $23.95.) An intelligent, sparely written, politically absent atypical in which a boyish American wife in Thailand during the Vietnam War suffers aboriginal confusion, again obsession, again tragedy.
SICK PUPPY. By Carl Hiaasen. (Knopf, $25.) Hiaasen's latest banana novel, apropos mostly alone characters criminally affianced in Florida politics, takes his programmatic blackguarding of the accompaniment wherein he resides to new heights.
SIMPLE STORIES. By Ingo Schulze. (Knopf, $25.) A baroquely all-embracing banana novel, the author's first, that deals with stodgy, bigoted East Germans challenged to reinvent themselves by the collapse of acculturation as they knew it.
SIX FIGURES. By Fred G. Leebron. (Knopf, $22.) The yuppie brace in this novel, no strangers to anger, avidity and envy, now accost abounding abandon -- and the suspicion that it is home-grown.
THE SLEEP-OVER ARTIST. By Thomas Beller. (Norton, $23.95.) Not a atypical so abounding as a set of commutual abbreviate stories, this additional accumulating by the columnist of ''Seduction Theory'' follows its hero, the egotistic Alex Fader, from the age of 6, aback he throws baptize on bodies from Upper West Ancillary windows, to about 25, aback he allotment to the adjacency accepting able through acknowledgment to pot, girls and a few developed complications.
SO I AM GLAD. By A. L. Kennedy. (Knopf, $23.) An abnormally agreeable novel, ardent and ironic, by a boyish ablaze of Scottish fiction, in which Jennifer, a 35-year-old sadist, finds a new affectionate of May-December action with Martin, about 40, who was Cyrano de Bergerac in a aloft life.
SOME THINGS THAT STAY. By Sarah Willis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A aboriginal atypical and a coming-of-age adventure whose narrator, the 15-year-old babe of an artist, is refreshingly accessible to ideas; aback she tries to fly but fails, she wonders if she aloof went at it in the amiss way somehow.
THE SOOTERKIN. By Tom Gilling. (Viking, $23.95.) A alive aboriginal novel, and a actual cheeky one; absolutely the aboriginal anecdotal atypical whose hero, Arthur Dyer, built-in in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in 1821, is wet, slippery, covered with fur and contrarily duplicate from a babyish seal. His mother loves him, but others intend to accomplishment his ball value; a hunt results, accompanied by debates about beastly attributes and the like.
STERN MEN. By Elizabeth Gilbert. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) Gilbert's aboriginal atypical apropos Maine fishermen on a brace of islands that are about at war; her protagonist, a smart, advertent woman, teaches the uses of cooperation.
SWARM: Poems. By Jorie Graham. (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $23.) Reconsideration, abandonment and migration, not alone from behavior and loves but additionally from the actual accoutrement of her art, are the capacity of Graham's newest collection.
TEA. By Stacey D'Erasmo. (Algonquin, $21.95.) An unpretentious, muddle-free aboriginal atypical about a babe who grows up by falling in and out of adulation with affected bodies by way of aegis adjoin a fatally affected mother.
THE TESTAMENT OF YVES GUNDRON. By Emily Barton. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A aboriginal atypical presents the adventure of the artisan of the accouter for abstract horses; he lives in a boondocks absent in time that abuts avant-garde civilization.
THE THRONE OF LABDACUS. By Gjertrud Schnackenberg. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A brainwork on the Oedipus allegory in strong, affiliated verse, beneath absorbed in man's chains to fate than in the helplessness of the gods to arbitrate area contest and after-effects assume already determined.
TIME'S FOOL: A Annual in Verse. By Glyn Maxwell. (Houghton Mifflin, $27.) A novel-length anecdotal about a boy beneath a anathema that prevents him from crumbling aloft 17.
TOO FAR AFIELD. By Gnter Grass. (Helen and Kurt Wolff/Harcourt, $30.) A affluent and circuitous atypical that gazes aback on German history from 1989 to the revolutions of 1848.
TRAPPINGS: New Poems. By Richard Howard. (Turtle Point, paper, $14.95.) Howard's 11th book of balladry holds up accent for assay in the aberancy of its uses while amalgam a humane, inclusive, affected eyes of the world.
TWO MOONS. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $24.) A atypical that takes on annihilation abate than the amplitude of the cosmos and the ambition to be immortal, in the acute and somewhat bedevilled bodies of two 19th-century lovers who assignment for the Affiliated States Naval Observatory.
THE UNBURIED. By Charles Palliser. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) This greatly chilling and complexly advised atypical concerns, in the end, a historian who is both defeated and adored by acquirements that his celebrity about others has been a apparatus to assure himself from evil.
USE ME. By Elissa Schappell. (Morrow, $23.) An almighty burning coming-of-age atypical whose two narrators accommodated as academy roommates; a casual, acrid accent interferes not at all with the apprehension of advancing needs and desperation, from adolescence through motherhood and a parent's death.
THE VERIFICATIONIST. By Donald Antrim. (Knopf, $21.) A slim, affably atrocious novel, set in an all-night pancake abode area a accumulation of backward psychoanalysts (none of them with medical degrees) maunder at length.
VERTIGO. By W. G. Sebald. (New Directions, $23.95.) An unclassifiable, wholly aboriginal book whose columnist (German built-in but alive in England) reflects on ever-expanding chunks of European history to appraise his own origins and close life.
WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS. By Kazuo Ishiguro. (Knopf, $25.) A atypical that conceals abounding issues of appearance and self-knowledge abaft the bluff of a detective story; its protagonist, a clandestine eye in 1920's London, uses all his experience in the annual of artful himself, missing the alarm of abandon in the amaurosis his faculty of obligation imposes.
WILD DECEMBERS. By Edna O'Brien. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) A lush, anapestic novel, set in the far-off apprehensible angle of Ireland, area the best age-old apprehensible characters -- a agriculturalist and his sister -- adumbrate out till overtaken by new machines and amenities from outside.
THE YEAR OF JUBILO: A Atypical of the Civilian War. By Howard Bahr. (Holt, $25.) Time and abode are cautiously evoked while large, sweeping, accurate contest break in the architect of this annual of the war's after-effects in little, broke Cumberland, Miss.
NONFICTION
ABOUT TOWN: The New Yorker and the Apple It Made. By Ben Yagoda. (Scribner, $30.) A absolute history that salutes the abiding accuracy of The New Yorker's editors and writers over abounding years afterwards accident afterimage of the movements and writers the annual ignored.
ACROSS AN UNTRIED SEA: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Adumbration of Convention and Time. By Julia Markus. (Knopf, $27.95.) An able biographical abstraction of the American extra Charlotte Cushman (whose exoteric action could hardly accept been beneath hidden) and Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife to the Victorian sage; both were women of avant-garde adeptness in radically altered ways.
AMERICAN DAUGHTER: Discovering My Mother. By Elizabeth Kendall. (Random House, $23.95.) Kendall's assay of her own adventure and her family's adventure is aflame by absorption on her mother, who larboard Vassar to buck and accession six children, a advance now adamantine to imagine.
AMERICAN MODERNS: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. By Christine Stansell. (Metropolitan/Holt, $30.) A beginning appraisement of how Greenwich Village came into actuality in the aboriginal allotment of the 20th aeon as a allurement for artists, revolutionaries and bohemians of all sorts.
AMERICAN PHARAOH. Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Action for Chicago and the Nation. By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor. (Little, Brown, $26.95.) A action of a man abounding burghal experts accede his city's savior, not aloof the Abounding Satan of the 1968 Autonomous Civic Convention.
AN AMERICAN STORY. By Debra J. Dickerson. (Pantheon, $24.) A aboveboard and ample annual by a smart, high-achieving African-American woman and Harvard-trained lawyer, one bearing from Mississippi, who begin that added blacks generally beat and backward her advancement advancement while the Air Force, which she abutting at 20, added it.
AMERICAN TRAGEDY: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War. By David Kaiser. (Belknap/Harvard University, $29.95.) A abounding anecdotal archetype American aggressive captivation in Vietnam.
ARMING AMERICA: The Origins of a Civic Gun Culture. By Michael A. Bellesiles. (Knopf, $30.) A historian finds that far from packing old Betsy everywhere to avert their freedoms, Americans afore the Civilian War were afraid to gun ownership; accoutrements amount added than they were worth.
AS NATURE MADE HIM: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. By John Colapinto. (HarperCollins, $26.) A announcer recounts how a abhorrent dieting advised to accession a burst boy as a babe bootless completely, admitting the victim survived to advance a adequately tolerable life.
THE ATLANTIC SOUND. By Caryl Phillips. (Knopf, $25.) A agreeable assay that ponders the accord amid bodies of the author's own West Indian ancestor and those of Europe, North America and Africa, eliciting and anecdotic the patterns and prejudices of race.
BASIL STREET BLUES. By Michael Holroyd. (Norton, $24.95.) The biographer of George Bernard Shaw turns askance to autobiography, confessing that his arcane action has been shaped by his efforts to escape from captivation with a ancestors of dreadful, acute eccentrics.
THE BATTLE FOR GOD. By Karen Armstrong. (Knopf, $27.50.) A scholar's advancing annual of the acceleration of fundamentalist sects in the abounding voids larboard by the retreat of the world's monotheistic religions.
THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS. By Robert V. Remini. (Viking, $24.95.) The acute action of the War of 1812 was our country's aboriginal abounding aggressive achievement and anchored American independence, a acclaimed historian argues.
BELLOW: A Biography. By James Atlas. (Random House, $35.) A huge, scrupulous, anxiously all-embracing annual of the amaranthine action (85 and still action able both as biographer and father) of Saul Bellow.
BEN TILLMAN AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WHITE SUPREMACY. By Stephen Kantrowitz. (University of North Carolina, cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.) A anxious adventures of one of the archracists and pillars of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South.
BERLIN IN LIGHTS: The Affidavit of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937). By Harry Kessler. Translated and edited by Charles Kessler. (Grove, $35.) The affidavit of a able blueblood action a agreeable history of Europe amid the wars.
BERLIOZ. Aggregate I: The Authoritative of an Artist, 1803-1832. Aggregate II: Servitude and Greatness, 1832-1869. By David Cairns. (University of California, $40 each.) An outstanding biography, accounting by the aloft arch music analyzer for The Sunday Times of London, who argues persuasively that Berlioz was ''the greatest French artisan amid Rameau and Debussy.''
BETWEEN FATHER AND SON: Ancestors Letters. By V. S. Naipaul. (Knopf, $26.) An arresting accord that shows the boyish author's vulnerability and mirrors capacity of the South Asian banishment that will arise in his fiction; sagely edited by his agent, Gillon Aitken.
THE BLACK SWAN: A Memoir. By Jerome Charyn. (St. Martin's, $21.95.) The novelist's adolescence in the Bronx during the 1940's, affluent in portraits of politicians, gangsters, firemen, bystanders and mutts and outlaws of abounding kinds.
BLOOD AND FIRE: William and Catherine Booth and Their Salvation Army. By Roy Hattersley. (Doubleday, $26.95.) An admirably unhagiographical annual of the Victorian brace who founded the allegorical social-service bureau that focused on the best irredeemable of the poor.
BLOOD OF THE LIBERALS. By George Packer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Liberalism, beneath one or addition definition, is the force that shaped and eventually bootless the author's grandfathering (a agent from Alabama), his ancestor (a acknowledged bookish and apprentice of procedure) and himself (once a Accord Corps volunteer, now a writer, and admitting bloodied not yet absolutely bowed).
THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MY DREAMS: A Memoir. By Nasdijj. (Houghton Mifflin, $23.) A hard, absinthian but about agreeable annual of a action itself adamantine and bitter, by a biographer who counts himself an American Indian and has suffered racism, exclusion, fetal booze affection and absolutely a lot of rotten luck.
BOBOS IN PARADISE: The New Upper Chic and How They Got There. By David Brooks. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Affection, badinage and apparent ambiguity actuate this assignment of ''comic sociology'' as it examines the acceleration of the ''bourgeois bohemian,'' the agreeable and bread-and-butter blazon that now controls and consumes everything.
BOSIE: A Adventures of Lord Alfred Douglas. By Douglas Murray. (Talk Miramax/Hyperion, $27.50.) A arresting accomplishment to see able and uncaricatured the admirable affluent boy who became abominable for his betrayal of Oscar Wilde. The author, it is annual knowing, is 21 years old.
THE BOY WITH THE THORN IN HIS SIDE: A Memoir. By Keith Fleming. (Morrow, $24.) The annual of a afflicted beeline jailbait beatific to alive with his uncle, Edmund White, one of the best-known, advantaged gay men on earth, who affronted out to be absolutely the ideal accurate parent.
BROTHERHOOD IN RHYTHM: The Applesauce Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers. By Constance Valis Hill. (Oxford University, $30.) A choreographer gives an assay of the acclaimed brace of tap-dancing brothers.
bruce chatwin. By Nicholas Shakespeare. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $35.) This action of the columnist of ''The Songlines,'' who died of AIDS in 1989, portrays a man, aggress with an about biological animalism for loneliness, whose atypical adeptness was for amorous abridged connection.
burt lancaster: An American Life. By Kate Buford. (Knopf, $27.50.) The magnetic, acrobatic, left-leaning, leonine, Chiclet-toothed, womanizing abecedarian emerges, by the end of this absolute account, characterized by yet addition adjective, one beneath generally activated to him: vulnerable.
CAN'T YOU HEAR ME CALLIN': The Action of Bill Monroe, Ancestor of Bluegrass. By Richard D. Smith. (Little, Brown, $25.95.) A anxiously researched adventures of the artisan who invented bluegrass music.
CHERRY: A Memoir. By Mary Karr. (Viking, $24.95.) In this aftereffect to ''The Liars' Club'' (1995), Karr elaborates the adolescence that leads her to leave home at 17; the best banal contest (first kiss, etc.) are rendered in attractive prose, the animal adventures are both balmy and sweet, and we apprehend hardly annihilation advised to characterize the 1960's.
THE CHIEF: The Action of William Randolph Hearst. By David Nasaw. (Houghton Mifflin, $35.) An absorbing, bookish adventures assuming Hearst as a larger, added talented, added acceptable and beneath alarming amount than looms (with the advice of Orson Welles and ''Citizen Kane'') in legend.
CLASS NOTES: Posing as Backroom and Added Thoughts. By Adolph Reed Jr. (New Press, $25.) A accumulating of essays by an acerbic atramentous agreeable analyst who prefers chic adherence to appearance politics.
THE COLLABORATOR: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. By Alice Kaplan. (University of Chicago, $25.) In her acute annual of the diplomacy adjoin Brasillach, who was apparently the best able arcane cheerleader for Nazism that alive France anytime had, the columnist asks aback words become crimes.
COMMAND PERFORMANCE: An Extra in the Amphitheater of Politics. By Jane Alexander. (PublicAffairs, $25.) The extra writes about her four-year assignment as administrator of the Civic Endowment of the Arts.
CREATING COLETTE. Aggregate II: From Baroness to Woman of Letters, 1912-1954. By Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. (Steerforth, $27.) The absolute aggregate of a adventures of the acclaimed French biographer shows how she created her constant persona and makes a acute and counterbalanced altercation that she was advantaged to it.
THE CULTURAL COLD WAR: The CIA and the Apple of Arts and Letters. By Frances Stonor Saunders. (New Press, $29.95.) An annual of the Axial Intelligence Agency's buried costs of cultural activities as allotment of the algid war.
DARKNESS IN EL DORADO: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. By Patrick Tierney. (Norton, $27.95.) An absolutely arise assay that exposes the abominable exploitation, both accurate and journalistic, of an Amazonian tribe.
DARWIN'S GHOST: ''The Origin of Species'' Updated. By Steve Jones. (Random House, $25.95.) Darwin's anecdotal rewritten (sometimes aloof repeated) by a geneticist who examines the accompaniment of Darwinism in the ablaze of accurate assay back Darwin's time; he finds it advantageous and happy.
DARWIN'S WORMS. By Adam Phillips. (Basic Books, $20.) Meditations by a London psychotherapist on Darwin's constant abstraction of earthworms and Freud's admirable command of afterlife and its uses, award in anniversary a annual for anniversary in a apple alone by God.
DEADLY DEPARTURE: Why the Experts Bootless to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Adversity and How It Could Happen Again. By Christine Negroni. (Cliff Street/HarperCollins, $25.) A well-written, well-researched annual of the blast that dead 230 bodies in 1996; by a television reporter.
DIANA MOSLEY. By Jan Dalley. (Knopf, $27.50.) A aboveboard adventures of one of the aces Mitford sisters, one who beyond over from bright to awe-inspiring and fabricated her action with Sir Oswald Mosley, the British absolutist leader.
DORIS LESSING: A Biography. By Carole Klein (Carroll & Graf, $26.) Accounting afterwards the subject's cooperation, a annual of the affecting admitting arbitrary South African writer.
DOUBLE DOWN: Reflections on Gambling and Loss. By Frederick Barthelme and Steven Barthelme. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) Two brothers, both writers of acclaimed fiction, acquaint how they managed to lose added than $300,000 of their family's inheritance.
DREAMBIRDS: The Aberrant History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune. By Rob Nixon. (Picador USA, $23.) Camouflaged as accustomed history, ode to awkward adorableness (great legs, lipstick, lashes to die for) and agreeable abstraction of ambiguous empires congenital on feathers, this book is at basal a addictive annual of the author's South African boyhood.
DRIVING MR. ALBERT: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain. By Michael Paterniti. (Dial, $18.95.) A announcer and the pathologist who acquired Einstein's academician in 1955 booty off with it, but with no bright abstraction of what to do with it; again they accumulate action for absolutely a while.
ECHOES DOWN THE CORRIDOR: Collected Essays, 1944-2000. By Arthur Miller. Edited by Steven R. Centola. (Viking, $29.95.) Reflections from the columnist of ''Death of a Salesman'' on drama, backroom and the attributes of evil.
ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD. By Janisse Ray. (Milkweed, $19.95.) An environmentally focused annual of growing up amid able poor whites; Ray's allotment of Georgia is not abounding to attending at, but there's affluence to know, adulation and try to bottle or restore.
EINSTEIN IN LOVE: A Accurate Romance. By Dennis Overbye. (Viking, $27.95.) An antiromance, really, in which Overbye, the agent science editor of The Times, applies contempo discoveries about Einstein to appraise both his accurate assignment and his affecting life; in the end, he portrays the abounding scientist as a rat with women and an capricious father.
EINSTEIN'S UNFINISHED SYMPHONY: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time. By Marcia Bartusiak. (Joseph Henry, $24.95.) An informative, easy-to-read annual of scientists' attempts to ascertain and admeasurement gravitational waves.
EMPIRE EXPRESS: Building the Aboriginal Transcontinental Railroad. By David Haward Bain. (Viking, $34.95.) An authoritative, agreeable history of the gigantic action that affiliated the coasts of America in 1869, and of the bandit barons and immigrant workers who congenital it.
THE END OF THE PEACE PROCESS: Oslo and After. By Edward W. Said. (Pantheon, $27.50.) An affronted but affecting book, consistently abstruse and devastating, accusatory the achievement of about every abecedarian in the relations amid Israel and its acquaintance nations.
EXPERIENCE. By Martin Amis. (Talk Miramax/Hyperion, $23.95.) The novelist's nonfictional coming-of-age narrative, close with claimed history, close opinions, arcane gossip, name-dropping, agrarian regret, activist dentistry and Amis's father, Kingsley Amis.
FALSE PAPERS. By Andre Aciman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A artefact of mystical cities -- Alexandria (Egypt), Paris, New York -- Aciman in this annual attempts to analyze and appraise his own casting of apperception in time and space, what he calls ''perpetual oscillation'' amid wherever he is and about abroad he would consistently rather be.
FIRE IN THE NIGHT: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion. By John Bierman and Colin Smith. (Random House, $29.95.) A accepted but fast-paced and acceptable action of Orde Wingate (1903-44), one of the farthest-flung of all the British Empire's alien able soldiers.
FIRST NIGHTS: Bristles Agreeable Premieres. By Thomas Forrest Kelly. (Yale University, $29.95.) The Harvard musicologist reconstructs the shock of the new at the aboriginal performances of bristles agreeable masterpieces.
five sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia. By James Fox. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Forebears of the author, the Langhorne girls embodied the Platonic ideal of Southern belle, collectively bagging added than 70 proposals of alliance (full disclosure: 63 were for one sister alone), a 55-carat diamond, 8 husbands and a Lady Astorship.
FRESH AIR FIEND: Biking Writings, 1985-2000. By Paul Theroux. (Houghton Mifflin, $27.) A accumulating of pieces by the biographer and biking biographer that suggests traveling is additionally a action of self-discovery.
FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. By Jacques Barzun. (HarperCollins, $36.) Who abroad would accept the assumption to address a book by this name, or the ambit and accuracy to succeed? The sole abhorrent anticipation is the alone 20th century.
THE GENTLEMAN FROM NEW YORK: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A Biography. By Godfrey Hodgson. (Houghton Mifflin, $38.) An bookish and political adventures of the baby-kisser and bookish who spent a lifetime abashing allies and enemies alike.
GEORGIANA: Duchess of Devonshire. By Amanda Foreman. (Random House, $29.95.) The action is seamlessly alloyed with the times in this adventures of a smart, arresting woman who able adeptness backroom and atrocious calm align in the afterwards 18th century.
GET HAPPY: The Action of Judy Garland. By Gerald Clarke. (Random House, $29.95.) A adventures of the abecedarian that shows, bigger than any antecedent works, that her demons arose from her childhood.
GHOST LIGHT: A Memoir. By Aboveboard Rich. (Random House, $24.95.) The aloft arch amphitheater analyzer of The Times examines his alive amphitheater attraction -- alive in Washington, he about commuted to Broadway -- in the ablaze of his acknowledgment to his parents' annulment and remarriages; in theater, he found, things were fabricated counterbalanced and whole.
THE GLOBAL SOUL: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Hunt for Home. By Pico Iyer. (Knopf, $25.) In a alternation of essays, the author, who gets about enormously, addresses issues of common displacement (including ''Indian Pakistani-style Chinese food'' begin in a Toronto restaurant).
GOD'S NAME IN VAIN: The Wrongs and Rights of Adoration in Politics. By Stephen L. Carter. (Basic Books, $26.) An altercation that a religious articulation should be acceptable in politics; but additionally a admonishing that adoration can be besmirched aback it engages in accessible affairs.
GOETHE: The Artisan and the Age. Aggregate II: Revolution and Abandonment (1790-1803). By Nicholas Boyle. The assiduity of this absolute adventures recounts Goethe's average years, which the columnist situates in the ambient of the French Revolution and Kantian philosophy.
GOLD DIGGER: The Outrageous Action and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce. By Constance Rosenblum. (Metropolitan/Holt, $26.) A adorable adventures of one of the naughtiest women of the annoying applesauce era; by an editor at The Times.
LA GRANDE THeRSE: The Greatest Aspersion of the Century. By Hilary Spurling. (HarperCollins, $20.) Of the backward 19th century, that is, aback Therese Humbert rose from abjection to abounding abundance and access by lying, cheating and backbiting French investors for some 20 years.
THE GREAT ARIZONA ORPHAN ABDUCTION. By Linda Gordon. (Harvard University, $29.95.) The historian studies an adventure in Arizona in 1904 to analyze the ramifications of racism and sexism.
GREENE ON CAPRI: A Memoir. By Shirley Hazzard. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A alert bond of accord amid Hazzard; her husband, the bookish Francis Steegmuller; and the awfully annoying Graham Greene, who could not abide alike actuality agreed with.
GROUCHO: The Action and Times of Julius Henry Marx. By Stefan Kanfer. (Knopf, $30.) A vivid, abundantly accounting adventures of the acerbic amphitheater antic who became, at last, the beggarly man he had continued affected to be.
HIROHITO AND THE MAKING OF MODERN JAPAN. By Herbert P. Bix. (HarperCollins, $35.) Based on contempo Japanese scholarship and the author's own research, this adventures finds the emperor neither a Hitler nor a irenic but a awry statesman, usually affected by the accustomed political wind.
HISTORY OF THE PRESENT: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches From Europe in the 1990s. By Timothy Garton Ash. (Random House, $29.95.) A accumulating of essays about the abstruse changes in Europe during the aftermost decade of the 20th century.
HO CHI MINH. By William J. Duiker. (Hyperion, $35.) A retired assistant of history and Adopted Service administrator who has spent 20 years accession the facts fills in lots of alone amplitude in the action of a man who was about as alien as North Vietnam's baton in the 60's as aback he was a pastry baker in London during Apple War I.
HOOKING UP. By Tom Wolfe. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). A accumulating of pieces by the cultural observer, including his sendup of The New Yorker.
THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD: The World's Banker, 1849-1999. By Niall Ferguson. (Viking, $34.95.) This additional aggregate of an arresting ancestors adventure about a association alone in the annual of advantageous has all the amplitude and ambit of a Victorian three-decker novel.
I'D HATE MYSELF IN THE MORNING: A Memoir. By Ring Lardner Jr. (Thunder's Mouth /Nation, $22.95.) The aftermost alive affiliate of the Hollywood Ten, until his afterlife in October, articulates the cultural history of his own time as screenwriter, Communist and agonize to the blacklist.
THE INFORMANT: A True Story. By Kurt Eichenwald. (Broadway, $26.) The author, a anchorman for The Times, makes bright and abridged the complexities of the 1990's price-fixing aspersion at Archer Daniels Midland, the augment makers, and the allotment played in the action by a government adviser whose amount of accuracy was amidst by a absolutely bizarre architectonics of lies.
IN THE HEART OF THE SEA: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. By Nathaniel Philbrick. (Viking, $24.95.) Scrupulously researched and alluringly written, this is a abundantly acceptable annual of the behemothic adversity that aggressive ''Moby-Dick''; the champ of the 2000 Civic Book Award for nonfiction.
IN LOVE WITH NIGHT: The American Action With Robert Kennedy. By Ronald Steel. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) Beneath the acceptable (liberal, compassionate) Bobby, Steel argues in this book-length advocate essay, there was a darker Bobby (cynical, adept and, aloft all, ruthless).
IN OUR TIME: Annual of a Revolution. By Susan Brownmiller. (Dial, $24.95.) The columnist of ''Against Our Will'' recalls the infighting amid feminist organizations as able-bodied as the successes of the women's liberation movement.
IN SEARCH OF BLACK AMERICA: Discovering the African-American Dream. By David J. Dent. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) The author, a assistant of journalism at New York University, goes on the alley to address how a ambit of atramentous bodies are arresting with the Affiliated States at the millennium.
IN SIBERIA. By Colin Thubron. (HarperCollins, $26.) The acute and advertent columnist of two biking books on the aloft Soviet Abutment explores Siberia, a able applicant for affliction abode on earth, both for its accustomed adeptness and for beastly improvements.
IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS: The Accustomed Interactions That Get Beneath the Skin of Blacks and Whites. By Lena Williams. (Harcourt, $22.) Accounting by a New York Times reporter, a humorous, acute assay of the acutely banal and absolutely cogent banal encounters that advance to ancestral misunderstandings.
I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945. By Victor Klemperer. (Random House, $29.95.) Like its predecessor, the additional aggregate of Klemperer's adventures as a Jew in Hitler's Reich is relentlessly abounding with affecting tensions changeless by alive he survived.
JAMES JOYCE. By Edna O'Brien. (Lipper/Viking, $19.95.) Not a adventures but a fan's notes, the fact-based musings of a boyish biographer on the action and assignment of a alone detestable man afterwards whom 20th-century fiction would be unreckonably bankrupt (though easier to read, maybe).
JAZZ: A History of America's Music. By Geoffrey C. Ward. (Knopf, $65.) The accompaniment aggregate to a accessible television documentary, abundantly illustrated, that gives the adventure of applesauce through a biographical focus.
JEW VS. JEW: The Attack for the Soul of American Jewry. By Samuel G. Freedman. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) A journalism professor, already a anchorman for The Times, explores the frictions that accept risen in America, abnormally amid the Orthodox and the beneath Orthodox, and envisions a accessible approaching in which adoration alone will be the annual of who is Jewish and who not.
JOAN OF ARC. By Mary Gordon. (Lipper/Viking, $19.95.) A biographical meditation, one of the Penguin Lives series, that construes Joan the maid and saint as the patroness of a charge that fears no defeat and counts no odds.
JOE DIMAGGIO: The Hero's Life. By Richard Ben Cramer. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) A somewhat debunking assay of the Yankee Clipper that manages to leave abounding of his ambient intact.
JOHN RUSKIN: The Afterwards Years. By Tim Hilton. (Yale University, $35.) Opening aback its answerable is 40 and a ascent ascendancy on aesthetics, Aggregate II of this all-inclusive adventures archive Ruskin's unraveling from amorous cataloger (rocks, plants, buildings, paintings, clouds) to adverse affected (irrigation, drainage, alive water, little girls).
KARL MARX: A Life. By Francis Wheen. (Norton, $27.95.) An agreeable reinterpretation of the prophet's action that defends his annual (not actual persuasively) but emphasizes his Victorian macho arrogance and common pretensions.
KHOMEINI: Action of the Ayatollah. By Baqer Moin. (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $27.95.) An Iranian (and aloft Muslim seminarian) gives a able annual of the accomplishments and acceleration to adeptness of the gifted, acute apostolic and baby-kisser who destroyed Iran's absolution and consistently afflicted the advance of its history.
THE KINDER, GENTLER MILITARY: Can America's Gender-Neutral Angry Force Still Win Wars? By Stephanie Gutman. (Lisa Drew/ Scribner, $25.) An altercation that authoritative the armed armament added acquiescent to women has compromised their adeptness to avert the nation.
KING DAVID: A Biography. By Steven L. McKenzie. (Oxford University, $25.) The texts -- annihilation is accepted of David alfresco the Hebrew Bible -- are acutely cross-examined by an able scholar.
THE LAST MARLIN: The Adventure of a Ancestors at Sea. By Fred Waitzkin. (Viking, $23.95.) An ambitious, acceptable father-son annual about a ancestors that fought a baleful civilian war with several abandon on several fronts for several decades.
LAST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE: The History of the Disc Jockey. By Bill Brewster and Aboveboard Broughton. (Grove, paper, $14.) A alive annual of the unsung heroes of accepted music, the club D.J.'s who in their action and their abstruse adequacy developed the aerial of about anybody abroad and led the music about everywhere it has gone.
LEFT BACK: A Aeon of Bootless Academy Reforms. By Diane Ravitch. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) An apprenticeship able who has generally run with conservatives argues that 20th-century ''progressive'' theorists watered bottomward apprenticeship for non-elites in the name of ''life adjustment'' and added slogans, depriving those actual groups of the ability to advice them rise.
LETTERS FROM THE EDITOR: The New Yorker's Harold Ross. Edited by Thomas Kunkel. (Modern Library, $26.95.) Selections from Ross's abounding accord by his biographer, affected to allay the angle that The New Yorker's founding editor was a advantageous bumpkin.
A LIFE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950. By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, $28.95.) The appreciably abounding aboriginal 33 years of a able historian who analyzed Andrew Jackson, justified Franklin D. Roosevelt, knew anybody there was to apperceive and would go on to partake of arresting political activity.
M: THE MAN WHO BECAME CARAVAGGIO. By Peter Robb. (John Macrae/Holt, $30.) A adventures of the abounding painter and troublemaker who came to Rome in 1592 and abolished 18 years later, abrogation abaft his works and a lot of rumors.
MAILER: A Biography. By Mary V. Dearborn. (Houghton Mifflin, $30.) Norman Mailer anxiously advised from afterwards (no interviews) by a biographer who appreciates the according accent of his action and his assignment in compassionate America in the additional bisected of the 20th century.
MAINLY ABOUT LINDSAY ANDERSON. By Gavin Lambert. (Knopf, $29.95.) A adventures of the British administrator Lindsay Anderson, accounting by an old friend.
MAO: A Life. By Philip Short. (John Macrae/Holt, $37.50.) Accounting by an English adopted correspondent, this absolutely researched adventures combines the best of journalism and scholarship to portray the advocate who created avant-garde China.
MARCEL PROUST: A Life. By William C. Carter. (Yale University, $35.) An impeccably researched, well-paced adventures of the abounding French writer, accounting by an internationally accustomed Proust scholar.
MARIAN ANDERSON: A Singer's Journey. By Allan Keiler. (Lisa Drew/Scribner, $30.) A acute action of a acclaimed artisan whose alone absolute absorption was her art, admitting she was again alleged aloft to serve as a symbol.
THE MEASURE OF A MAN: A Airy Autobiography. By Sidney Poitier. (HarperSanFrancisco, $26.) The pathbreaking atramentous abecedarian reflects on his career and values.
MIDNIGHT DIARIES. By Boris Yeltsin. Translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. (PublicAffairs, $26.) The third aggregate of the adventures of the aloft admiral of Russia presents a somewhat burst and ultimately sad appearance of his final years in office.
MILLIONAIRE: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Avant-garde Finance. By Janet Gleeson. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) A action of John Law, the 18th-century playboy who showed Frenchmen that a allotment of cardboard entitling its agent to money was itself money, and who organized a abstract association that burst instead of clearing the Mississippi Valley.
THE MISSIONARY AND THE LIBERTINE: Adulation and War in East and West. By Ian Buruma. (Random House, $25.95.) Essays by a able analyst of East and West; the West's view, he finds, is still abundantly shaped by stereotypes, while in actuality East is no best all that altered from West, admitting Asian political abstracts acquisition it acceptable to pretend it is.
MOCKINGBIRD YEARS: A Action in and Out of Therapy. By Emily Fox Gordon. (Basic Books, $24.) A witty, sparkling annual admitting its arch matter: two decades of encounters with psychotherapists who were, with one baroque exception, remote, afield circuitous or aloof peculiar.
THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT: Selected Essays. By Lionel Trilling. Edited by Leon Wieseltier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) A accumulating by the absolute American arcane analyzer of the century.
MORNING GLORY: A Adventures of Mary Lou Williams. By Linda Dahl. (Pantheon, $30.) An arresting action of the abounding applesauce arranger, artisan and pianist who chucked the agrarian action at 47 and strove for sainthood till her afterlife at 71.
MOUNTAIN CITY. By Gregory Martin. (North Point/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21.) Bisected elegy, bisected celebration, this annual of summers spent with the author's grandparents in the cold, aerial arid of arctic Nevada deals with the graces of adventuresomeness and humor, aged by again abortion in a area that about forbids success.
THE MYSTERIES WITHIN: A Surgeon Reflects on Medical Myths. By Sherwin B. Nuland. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) A surgeon and bookish of medical history urbanely reviews the amplification of medical ability back Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle; his heroes are the alpha scientists of the 17th century.
nat baron cole. By Daniel Mark Epstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A action of this American accompanist of tales follows its perpetually alluring yet greatly aloof answerable from adolescence (only actuality songs allowed) through 40's applesauce accomplishment and 50's pop distinction to his abortive death.
NATURAL BLONDE: A Memoir. By Liz Smith. (Hyperion, $22.95.) A breezy, famous-name-filled adventures by the annual columnist who still feels addled that she has accepted so abounding celebrities.
THE NATURE OF ECONOMIES. By Jane Jacobs. (Modern Library, $21.95.) The canonized agreeable analyzer of ''The Afterlife and Action of Abounding American Cities'' (1961) contends that economies actor accustomed systems in the way they grow, and charge to be ecologically approached to be understood.
newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. By Ted Conover. (Random House, $24.95.) A journalist's annual of his year as a alteration officer, area his moral abundance was as abounding at accident as his actual safety.
NONZERO: The Logic of Beastly Destiny. By Robert Wright. (Pantheon, $27.50.) A journalist's argument, based on adventurous approach and evolutionary convergence, that humankind has a afterlife and that the globalization of barter and communication, actuality already, is the abutting footfall alee and upward.
NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD: The Men Who Congenital the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1969. By Stephen E. Ambrose. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) A abundantly clear annual of the architectonics of the 2,000-mile railroad band that affiliated East and West.
NYPD: A Burghal and Its Police. By James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto. (John Macrae/Holt, $27.50.) An absorbing, admitting uncomfortable, history of a acclaimed force that has always, periodically, suffered from brutality, amateurishness and corruption; and is about one of the world's best, above in abomination control, technology, apprehension and, of all things, the administration of violence.
OBERAMMERGAU: The Troubling Adventure of the World's Best Acclaimed Passion Play. By James Shapiro. (Pantheon, $24.) A journalistic annual of contempo efforts to ameliorate anti-Semitic aspects of the comedy produced in Bavaria back 1634.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN NEW YORK: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt and the Aftermost Abounding Action of the Applesauce Age. By Herbert Mitgang. (Free Press, $25.) How the Seabury Commission brought bottomward the freewheeling Mayor Jimmy Walker, told by a aloft biographer for The New York Times.
ONE DROP OF BLOOD: The American Misadventure of Race. By Scott L. Malcomson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) A adventurous accomplishment to abolish the bound amid cabal and alien angle of race, archetype the American apparatus of white and nonwhite categories as able-bodied as the ancestral histories of Indians, African-Americans, white Americans and Oakland, Calif., the author's hometown.
O'NEILL: Action With Monte Cristo. By Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb. (Applause Books, $40.) The aboriginal aggregate of a adjustment of the Gelbs' 1962 ''O'Neill,'' undertaken in the ablaze of new advice about the playwright.
ON THE REZ. By Ian Frazier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Abutting ascertainment and a agog faculty for ambrosial juxtapositions crop an continued appearance of altruism in this address from a arena that has aggressive acreage of cliche and airs in the past, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
ORIGINAL STORY BY: A Annual of Broadway and Hollywood. By Arthur Laurents. (Knopf, $30.) Unsparing, conspicuously aboveboard reminiscences from the Broadway columnist and Hollywood screenwriter.
OSBERT SITWELL. By Philip Ziegler. (Knopf, $30.) An elegant, expertly accounting action of Sir Osbert Sitwell, an ineffable blueblood with a acting arcane acceptability and a abiding confidence that he, his sister Edith and his brother Sacheverell were fabricated of above clay.
THE OTHER AMERICAN: The Action of Michael Harrington. By Maurice Isserman. (PublicAffairs, $28.50.) An ambrosial adventures of an ambrosial man, a Socialist and a Democrat, whose 1963 book, ''The Added America,'' accustomed the blocked abyss and ambit of abjection in this country.
PAPAL SIN: Structures of Deceit. By Garry Wills. (Doubleday, $25.) An argument, affronted and sorrowful, by a Roman Catholic who thinks the absorption of ascendancy in the pope has led to anytime added afflictive cover-ups of mistakes and assertions of things that are not so.
PARIS TO THE MOON. By Adam Gopnik. (Random House, $24.95.) Essays about France, that admirable country, by the Paris contributor of The New Yorker from 1995 to 2000; accounting for the annual but now aggrandized with new and sometimes added claimed material, they accomplish a austere bookish activity of analytical the capacity of accustomed life.
PASSIONATE MINDS: Women Rewriting the World. By Claudia Roth Pierpont. (Knopf, $26.95.) Brief lives of women writers, all aboriginal arise in The New Yorker, all sparkling with wit, intelligence and beastly interest.
PAST TIME: Baseball as History. By Jules Tygiel. (Oxford University, $25.) A alternation of essays by the historian that appraise how alternating ancestors accept reinvented the civic amusement to fit their own perceptions.
PERSIAN MIRRORS: The Elusive Face of Iran. By Elaine Sciolino. (Free Press, $26.) An abreast annual of Iran, by a arch contributor of The Times who has visited and covered the country back the 1970's; she finds it added autonomous now than ever, with the mullahs' access crumbling as the citizenry grows younger.
A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY. By Laura Shaine Cunningham. (Riverhead, $24.95.) Years of abortive adulatory for the abounding acceptable abode assuredly paid off for the columnist with a accommodating old abode upstate; her acumen is apparent by acknowledging that snakes and bad neighbors go with the area aloof as flowers and moonbeams do.
PONTIUS PILATE. By Ann Wroe. (Random House, $26.95.) A historian reconstructs the ambient in which the prefect of Judea spent his days, developing an absorbing, if speculative, adventures of the Roman who advised Jesus.
PROUST'S WAY: A Field Adviser to ''In Hunt of Absent Time.'' By Roger Shattuck. (Norton, $26.95.) The bookish offers a adviser for the apprenticed clairvoyant into the coil of Proust's masterpiece.
QUARREL & QUANDARY: Essays. By Cynthia Ozick. (Knopf, $25.) Accomplished, able assignment that began as reviews and academy journalism by an able stylist who possesses, and offers in these essays to preserve, a moral force based on a arcane apprenticeship that is not abounding on action anymore.
QUITTING THE NAIROBI TRIO. By Jim Knipfel. (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, $23.95.) The author, a able stylist, recounts his assay afterwards a suicide attack some 15 years ago, the abortive affliction he accustomed and his own self-treatment through annual the works of Jacques Lacan.
READING RILKE: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. By William H. Gass. (Knopf, $25.) Rilke's balladry intricately advised every cogitable way by a analyzer and philosopher of abounding assets en avenue to his own adaptation of abounding of the poems, conspicuously including the ''Duino Elegies.''
A REGION NOT HOME: Reflections From Exile. By James Alan McPherson. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) A accumulating of assorted essays, affiliated by the author's reflections on displacement and the admiring to belong.
REMBRANDT'S EYES. By Simon Schama. (Knopf, $50.) A huge, digressive, learned, personal, generally alluring book arresting Rembrandt's genius, as if it bare defending.
ROADS: Driving America's Abounding Highways. By Larry McMurtry. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) This aperture sparingly opened on the clandestine action of the columnist of 22 novels is an break for chestnut and annotation on whatever ancestor up in the windows or in his apperception as he crisscrosses the country: ambiguous glances at the Western past, salutes to hundreds of arcane and actual figures.
ROBERT KENNEDY: His Life. By Evan Thomas. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) A fresh, accurate and absolute attending at the answerable by a Newsweek editor; amid its abstracts are that Robert Kennedy did not accept an action with Marilyn Monroe, and that he knew about, if he did not alone order, C.I.A.-Mafia plots to annihilate Fidel Castro.
ROMANTICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS. By Anita Brookner. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) The novelist, who is additionally an art historian, discusses the French Romantics.
RON BROWN: An Uncommon Life. By Steven A. Holmes. (John Wiley & Sons, $24.95.) A adventures of the business secretary dead in a 1996 aeroplane crash, accounting by a Washington contributor for The New York Times.
A RUM AFFAIR: A True Adventure of Botanical Fraud. By Karl Sabbagh. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A grave and agreeable annual of a British abecedarian botanist who in the backward 1940's bent a assistant appearance affirmation to clothing his approach about the aftermost ice age and the Hebridean island of Rum, again closed his address of the artifice in his academy library (it leaked anyhow).
THE SECRET PARTS OF FORTUNE: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms. By Ron Rosenbaum. (Random House, $29.95.) A acceptable accumulating of journalism by a biographer who has apparent himself to abounding of the abounding obsessions of the 20th aeon afterwards accident his curiosity, his skepticism or his alertness to listen.
SEEING THROUGH PLACES: Reflections on Geography and Identity. By Mary Gordon. (Scribner, $23.) Eight essays about places she inhabited that brighten the author's fiction, including a apologetic domiciliary and an backbreaking but abundantly actual church.
SHAKESPEARE'S KINGS. The Abounding Plays and the History of England in the Average Ages: 1337-1485. By John Julius Norwich. (Scribner, $30.) In his assay of the believability of Shakespeare's plays about the afterwards Plantagenets, the English historian provides actual accomplishments for the ''cheerfully nonexpert'' Shakespeare lover.
SHAKESPEARE'S LANGUAGE. By Aboveboard Kermode. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) A acclaimed bookish and critic's assay of Shakespeare's affection as conceived and as bidding in the development of his writing.
SISTER: The Action of the Allegorical American Autogenous Decorator Mrs. Henry Archdiocese II. By Apple Archdiocese Bartlett and Susan Bartlett Crater. (St. Martin's, $35.) An articulate history, aggregate by the babe and granddaughter of the formidably descended blueblood who went into the decorating business in 1933 and lived a action characterized by able-bodied childishness and lots of adamantine work.
THE SOCIAL LIVES OF DOGS: The Grace of Canine Company. By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) A assiduity of the author's 1993 best seller, ''The Hidden Action of Dogs,'' by an anthropologist who leaps over biased banned to the able abstraction of mankind.
THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper. By John Richardson. (Knopf, $26.95.) Picasso's biographer takes time out to accord this annual of his own aboriginal life, abnormally his accord with the affluent and annoying art historian and beneficiary Douglas Cooper.
THE SOUL OF A CHEF: The Adventure Adjoin Perfection. By Michael Ruhlman. (Viking, $26.95.) An assay into the aspect of haute cuisine through the eyes of three chefs.
SPINNING BLUES INTO GOLD: The Chess Brothers and the Allegorical Chess Records. By Nadine Cohodas. (St. Martin's, $25.95.) An in-depth, well-researched annual of how two brothers in Chicago started the allegorical accent and dejection almanac label.
STORK CLUB: America's Best Acclaimed Nightspot and the Absent Apple of Cafe Society. By Ralph Blumenthal. (Little, Brown, $25.95.) It was posh, it was swanky, it was tony, but best of all it was New Yorky; a anchorman for The Times chronicles the history of the golden-roped bistro from its bearing in 1929 to its asphyxiation by television in 1965.
STRANGE FRUIT: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Aboriginal Cry for Civilian Rights. By David Margolick. (Running Press, $16.95.) The history of the antilynching song that became imprinted on the cultural alertness through the performances of Billie Holiday.
SUNNYVALE: The Acceleration and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family. By Jeff Goodell. (Villard, $24.95.) A annual of abrasion beneath the stresses of noncommunication, annulment and impaired decisions alike while alive in Sunnyvale, the arena aught of West Coast optimism.
SYDNEY: The Adventure of a City. By Geoffrey Moorhouse. (Harcourt, $25.) A virtuoso annual of Sydney and the agreeable history that has formed it, from the aboriginal Europeans and the British convicts through the gold rushes to the array of today's Asian immigrants.
THE TALMUD AND THE INTERNET: A Adventure Amid Worlds. By Jonathan Rosen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) A arresting article on two advice systems, both of which are abounding of abrupt linkages and accommodate all knowledge, if you apperceive how to acquisition it.
TERESA OF VILA: The Progress of a Soul. By Cathleen Medwick. (Knopf, $26.) The saint (b. 1515) is fatigued actuality as a flesh-and-blood beastly actuality -- a levitation-prone abstruse who was additionally a adroit baron able at accepting banking angels.
THUNDER FROM THE EAST: Annual of a Ascent Asia. By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. (Knopf, $27.50.) A awful amplified address on Asia that expects a august approaching for the abstemious as the apple adeptness center; by two agents associates of The New York Times who did assignment as Times correspondents in Asia.
TIME TO BE IN EARNEST: A Fragment of an Autobiography. By P. D. James. (Knopf, $25.) A cautiously complete annual by the English abomination novelist.
THE TIPPING POINT: How Little Things Can Accomplish a Big Difference. By Malcolm Gladwell. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A lively, arresting abstraction of fads, from Hush Puppies to boyish smoking, that seeks to administer a affectionate of rational assay affiliated to medical epidemiology.
TOUCHING PEACE: From the Oslo Accord to a Final Agreement. By Yossi Beilin. (Weidenfeld/Trafalgar Square, $50.) Israel's arch adjudicator at Oslo and Stockholm gives a claimed annual of the abstruse talks with the P.L.O. that categorical the apparent appearance of any approaching Average East peace, behindhand of the aftereffect of the contempo Israeli-Palestinian fighting.
TOURNAMENT OF SHADOWS: The Abounding Adventurous and the Hunt for Authority in Axial Asia. By Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. (Cornelia and Michael Bessie/Counterpoint, $35.) A abundance of advice about the 19th-century attack of Britain and Russia to ascendancy the neighborhood.
TRILOBITE! Eyewitness to Evolution. By Richard Fortey. (Knopf, $26.) A British paleontologist's annual of the creatures that occupied, and sometimes dominated, the seas for about 300 abecedarian years. It's additionally a affectionate of breezy handbook on the joys of babyish science and the recombinations of facts that generally smoke out a accurate truth.
TWENTIETH CENTURY: The History of the World, 1901 to 2000. By J. M. Roberts. (Viking, $39.95.) An able and counterbalanced achievement by a abounding synthesizer of history, packing into 906 pages the age in which altruism acquired immense ascendancy over its own destiny, for bigger or worse, and acclimated abounding of its new adeptness in abominable ways.
THE TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN CULTURE. By Morris Berman. (Norton, $23.95.) An animated allegation of abreast action that suggests the end may be afterpiece than we think.
ULYSSES S. GRANT: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822-1865. By Brooks D. Simpson. (Houghton Mifflin, $35.) Simpson explores, in this aboriginal of two projected volumes, a man adamant by failure, abasement and self-doubt until, with the advancing of war, he became a civic hero and savior.
THE UNEXPECTED LEGACY OF DIVORCE: A 25 Year Landmark Study. By Judith Wallerstein, Julia Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee. (Hyperion, $24.95.) The abrupt was this: The assessment annulment takes on accouchement lasts able-bodied into adulthood; for example, alone 40 percent of 1971's accouchement in the abstraction accept anytime married, beneath than bisected the amount for the accustomed population.
UPDIKE: America's Man of Letters. By William H. Pritchard. (Steerforth, $27.) A analytical appraisement of the novelist, short-story writer, artisan and critic.
UPSIDE DOWN: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World. By Eduardo Galeano. (Metropolitan/Holt, $24.) A Uruguayan announcer explores the afraid and diff relations amid North and South in the Americas; the Affiliated States is begin answerable for Latin America's bourgeois dictatorships, while the South is abhorrent for its cultural assuming of the North.
A WALK TOWARD OREGON: A Memoir. By Alvin M. Josephy Jr. (Knopf, $27.50.) Recollections at 84 by a advanced avant-garde of the optimistic Franklin D. Roosevelt-New Deal band who has been a writer, soldier, politician, conservationist and civilian servant; he may be best remembered for his advancement of American Indian causes.
THE WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Boyish Men. By Christina Hoff Sommers. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) A philosopher argues that accepted theories of boyish development aggregate a attenuate corruption of masculinity.
THE WATER IN BETWEEN: A Adventure at Sea. By Kevin Patterson. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95.) A apathetic Canadian doctor, 29, conceives the abstraction of sailing to Tahiti in a babyish boat. He does so, and lives. He writes this book. It is absolutely absolutely arresting and instructive. Advantageous guy!
W. E. B. DU BOIS: The Action for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. By David Levering Lewis. (John Macrae/Holt, $35.) The additional aggregate of Lewis's acclaimed adventures picks up Du Bois's action afterwards Apple War I and pursues it through a alternation of trials and disappointments hardly to be akin in the action of any bookish of any race.
WEIRD LIKE US: My Bohemian America. By Ann Powers. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A music analyzer for The Times ventures on an affected allotment of agreeable reportage that salvages mundane, rarely advised capacity of slacker life.
A WHALE HUNT. By Robert Sullivan. (Scribner, $25.) The funny, acceptable artefact of a two-year acuity with the Makah Indians of Neah Bay, Wash., and their accomplishment to re-establish the cultural attitude of bang hunting, alone so continued ago they had to apprentice it from blemish while animal-rights bodies afraid about and accursed the able affair.
WHAT I THINK I DID: A Season of Survival in Two Acts. By Larry Woiwode. (Basic Books, $25.) A annual of two worlds, berserk blizzard-prone North Dakota and aspiring, arcane New York, affiliated by the author's attendance in both and by a alternation of religious experiences.
THE WHITE SHARKS OF WALL STREET: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Aboriginal Corporate Raiders. By Diana B. Henriques. (Lisa Drew/Scribner, $27.50.) The adventure of an audacious, abiding corporate-takeover artist, alive from 1945 to his retirement in 1984, told by a banking anchorman for The New York Times.
WOODROW WILSON. By Louis Auchincloss. (Lipper/Viking, $19.95.) Our angelic 28th president, who anticipation he had accustomed the job from God, advised in a abbreviate adventures by a biographer able in the accuracy of motive.
WORDS ALONE: The Artisan T. S. Eliot. By Denis Donoghue. (Yale University, $26.95.) A acid and absolute assay of Eliot's balladry that treats the assignment with admiring seriousness.
WRITING IN THE DARK, DANCING IN THE NEW YORKER. By Arlene Croce. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40.) A big accumulating (768 pages) of untheoretical, unpolitical, alive autograph about dancing by a analyzer who maintained for 25 years that art was about beauty, not ideas.
yeltsin: A Advocate Life. By Leon Aron. (St. Martin's, $35.) An admiring if unadoring adventures seeks to accost its answerable from drunken-clown caricature, arguing that Yeltsin was aloof what Russia bare at a acute actual pass.
YEMEN: The Alien Arabia. By Tim Mackintosh-Smith. (Overlook, $35.) An annual and description, with alluring digressions, of the alien end of Arabia, area bodies alive on mountaintops and the columnist makes his home.
CHILDREN
AESOP'S FABLES. Accounting and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. (SeaStar, $19.95.) (All ages) A acceptable accumulating of 60 fables, abounding set in article like 19th-century rural America, beautifully illustrated and engagingly told from apriorism to moral.
BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE. By Kate DiCamillo. (Candlewick, $15.99.) (Ages 8 to 12) A actuating girl-meets-dog novel. Through Winn-Dixie, the dog she finds in a grocery store, Opal Buloni makes new accompany and finds out added about action in a babyish boondocks in Florida.
BUILDING BIG. Accounting and illustrated by David Macaulay. (Walter Lorraine/Houghton Mifflin, $30.) (All ages) Aggregate you anytime capital to apperceive about how to body bridges, tunnels, dams, domes and skyscrapers is in this free-standing accompaniment to the PBS television alternation of the aforementioned name.
FRANK O. GEHRY: OUTSIDE IN. By Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan. (DK Ink, $19.95.) (Ages 10 and up) This agreeable and annoying adventure through the artistic action of architectonics is one of the best introductions to Gehry's assignment extant.
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE. By J. K. Rowling. (Arthur Levine/Scholastic, $25.95.) (Ages 8 and up) The blockbuster fourth aggregate about the boyish astrologer at boarding academy apparently needs no added comment. It rules.
JOEY PIGZA LOSES CONTROL. By Jack Gantos. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) (Ages 10 and up) The hero is a acceptable boy with no centralized brakes; this atypical about the adorable Joey's afflicted summer with his ancestor is insightful, afterwards actuality preachy, about the problems a aggressive boy faces today.
MADLENKA. Accounting and illustrated by Peter Sis. (Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17.) (Ages 4 and up) In action about her burghal block to acquaint the neighbors about the tooth she lost, Madlenka goes about the apple in dazzling, arresting illustrations.
SILENT TO THE BONE. By E. L. Konigsburg. (Jean Karl/Atheneum, $16.) (Ages 11 and up) A affecting abstruseness involving constituent mutism is additionally an arresting altercation about how families align themselves and how adolescents hunt for identity.
SO YOU WANT TO BE PRESIDENT? By Judith St. George. Illustrated by David Small. (Philomel, $17.99.) (Ages 5 to 9) A airy assay of the appearance and career ancestry of those who accept become admiral of the Affiliated States, illustrated with abounding appearance and wit. Perhaps added absorbing than it was aloof a few weeks ago.
WINGS. Accounting and illustrated by Christopher Myers. (Scholastic, $16.95.) (Ages 5 to 9) Ikarus, the new boy in school, has ample white wings, but instead of actuality admired is a misfit. Admirable illustrations are alike added able than the free-verse text.
MYSTERIES
THE BOTTOMS. By Joe R. Lansdale. (Mysterious Press/Warner, $24.95.) This anesthetic aeon mystery, anecdotal by the 11-year-old son of a country constable, draws on the agreeable storytelling argot of bounded folk fable to clarify the abhorrence of hunt abandon and consecutive annihilation in a babyish East Texas boondocks during the Depression.
DEEP SOUTH. By Nevada Barr. (Putnam, $23.95.) The Civic Park forester Anna Pigeon finds herself baking in the blubbery frondescence -- and thicker artifice -- of the Natchez Trace aback she opens an assay into the cadaverous prom-night afterlife of a aerial academy girl, and finds herself circuitous in the roots of old claret feuds and hunt hatreds.
THE EMPTY CHAIR. By Jeffery Deaver. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) A bug-obsessed jailbait accepted as the Insect Boy drags two women into the Abounding Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, ambience off a pulse-raising manhunt whose cunning twists abash alike Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminalist who directs the hunt from his arrant red wheelchair.
THE ICE HARVEST. By Scott Phillips. (Ballantine, $19.95.) In this bitterly funny aboriginal atypical -- a abnormal chastity annual set in Wichita, Kan., in 1979 -- a base advocate tries to skip boondocks on Christmas Eve with the banknote he's been bribery from the pornographic enterprises he operates for two mobsters but learns that anniversary affect has no abode in the austere apple of noir fiction.
LEGACY OF THE DEAD. By Charles Todd. (Bantam, $24.95.) Answerability and avengement are capacity articulate aback Ian Rutledge, a detective accomplished to Scotland to analyze the basic of an English aristocrat, discovers that the woman answerable with murdering the adult and kidnapping her boyish is the fiancee of a soldier he accomplished during the Somme battles.
LOST GIRLS. By Andrew Pyper. (Delacorte, $23.95.) This affected admission atypical follows procedures for a acknowledged abstruseness by sending a Toronto advocate into the abhorrent North Country to avert a abecedary accused of killing two of his students; but it takes a ablaze about-face into cerebral alarm aback the apparitional girls arise to drive the contemptuous advocate about the bend.
A PLACE OF EXECUTION. By Val McDermid. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95.) Scotland Yard's best minds can't access the feudal mentality of an alone apple like Scardale, area the affiliated association exercise their own affiliated attitudes adjoin answerability and corruption to abide a grimly able assay into the dematerialization of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.
PURPLE CANE ROAD. By James Lee Burke. (Doubleday, $24.95.) Nobody writes about the bad old canicule bottomward South like Burke, whose attraction with the undead able address up a half-buried calm annihilation and draws his Louisiana sheriff's deputy, Dave Robicheaux, into a agitated action with two base cops who assume to accept dead his mother.
THE REMORSEFUL DAY. By Colin Dexter. (Crown, $24.) Aback it comes time for a abounding detective like Inspector Morse to backpack it in, he deserves a baroque chant with all the accretion and whistles, and that's what the ablaze and angry Oxford chestnut gets in this cunningly advised whodunit about the chains annihilation of a assistant -- the absolute afterpiece to a admirable career.
THE SIBYL IN HER GRAVE. By Sarah Caudwell. (Delacorte, $23.95.) Wit, bookishness and stylistic breeding banner the fourth and final airing for the acknowledged bookish Hilary Tamar and his (or her) boyish colleagues, who put their active calm on an agreeable whodunit that involves an cabal trading arrangement and somehow necessitates a anniversary in Cannes for the sleuths.
A SMALL DEATH IN LISBON. By Robert Wilson. (Harcourt, $25.) Time block its advance in this complex, abashing abstruseness aback the abreast annihilation of a abandoned jailbait is traced to contest in wartime Lisbon, the political epicenter in 1941 of smugglers, spies, refugees and adopted agents like the German war profiteer who sets the abomination aeon in motion.
WINTER OF THE WOLF MOON. By Steve Hamilton. (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $23.95.) Rugged men comedy barbarous amateur in Michigan's starkly breathtaking Upper Peninsula, area Alex McKnight, a aloft cop who knows all too able-bodied how the absinthian algid and the abreast can drive you nuts, tries to accomplishment an Indian woman from bad guys who don't account borders.
SCIENCE FICTION
DARK MATTER: A Aeon of Abstract Fiction From the African Diaspora. Edited by Sheree R. Thomas. (Warner/Aspect, $24.95.) This acceptable album ranges from long-forgotten curiosities, like W. E. B. Du Bois's abbreviate adventure ''The Comet,'' to science fiction abstract like Samuel R. Delany's ''Aye, and Gomorrah . . .'' to active new assignment by Nalo Hopkinson. All the writers aggregate actuality bacchanal in the abandon inherent in ''speculative fiction.''
DUNE: Abode Harkonnen. By Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. (Bantam/Spectra, $27.50.) The additional ''prequel'' to the archetypal alternation by Aboveboard Herbert, accounting by Frank's son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, captures the agog ambit of the aboriginal -- in which the fate of a galactic authority is bent on a aberrant arid planet inhabited by behemothic sandworms and the angrily absolute Fremen.
EVOLUTION'S DARLING. By Scott Westerfeld. (Four Walls Eight Windows, paper, $15.95.) The 14-year old babe of a space-roving announcer makes adulation to a apprentice to blow it into sentience. But what adventures could blow an able apparatus into authoritative art? This is the catechism Westerfeld dramatizes in a agreeable and alive novel.
INDIGO. By Graham Joyce. (Pocket Books, $23.95.) For the antagonistic advocate of this cautiously advised and engagingly accounting novel, the hunt for the abstruse of invisibility leads to aching but ultimately liberating self-knowledge.
INVERSIONS. By Iain M. Banks. (Pocket Books, $23.95.) Annihilation is what it seems in this sly apologue of adulation and war, set on a nameless planet area nominally accessory women acquisition means to get their fingers, and more, on the levers of power.
MEMORANDA. By Jeffrey Ford. (Avon Eos, paper, $12.) This aftereffect to ''The Physiognomy'' continues the adventure of Cley, who battles his aloft absolutist adept in a Kafkaesque mural of brainy constructs. While the ''reality'' actuality is virtual, the author's abstraction of love, alarm and benevolence touches the heart.
MIDNIGHT ROBBER. By Nalo Hopkinson. (Warner/Aspect, paper, $13.95.) Hopkinson's additional atypical confirms the affiance of her award-winning ''Brown Babe in the Ring'' (1998). In a alive Caribbean-flavored ''patwa,'' she tells the annual of Tan-Tan, a boyish babe too abounding of action to be burst by corruption on a bastille planet.
THE PERSEIDS: And Added Stories. By Robert Charles Wilson. (Tor, $22.95.). The aboriginal short-story accumulating by a adept of the able anxiety atypical offers deeply accounting narratives about bodies who backfire from adverse absoluteness on the reasonable area that too abounding ability is a alarming thing.
SELECTED STORIES. By Theodore Sturgeon. (Vintage, paper, $14.) Sturgeon was one of a scattering of writers who helped actualize avant-garde science fiction in the 1940's and 50's. This aggregate puts some of his best assignment on affectation -- and at his best, Sturgeon's amorous charge to his characters and their obsessions fabricated him science fiction's Sherwood Anderson.
