Hot Type

he tumultuous life of Dawn Powell, the vastly undervalued comic literary novelist who could arm-wrestle Dorothy Parker to a draw, is fabulously rendered in TIM PAGE'S entertaining Dawn Powell: A Biography (Henry Holt), which follows her from feisty 13-yearold runaway to the mad, bad, bohemian chronicler of Jazz Age New York.

Also this month: An upwardly mobile London insurance adjuster is ensnared in a bizarre fraud scheme in WILLIAM BOYD'S inventive page-turner Armadillo (Knopf). Ol' Blue Eyes is fondly remembered by his pal PETE HAMILL in Why Sinatra Matters (Little, Brown). Distinctly American storyteller JIM HARRISON'S graceful epic The Road Home (Atlantic Monthly Press) powerfully charts the landscape of the Great Plains and the seismic shifts in a part-Native American family from the 19th century to the present. In HOMER H. HICHAM'S made-for-the-movies memoir, Rocket Boys (Delacorte), a gang of plucky lads discover how to turn scrap metal into rockets and escape their dead-end coal-mining town for the stars. Revenge is a dish best served cold: PHILIP ROTH'S piping-hot novel I Married a Communist (Houghton Mifflin) sends up a disgruntled wife who skewers her cranky, disillusioned husband in a tell-all book. The poet Robert Lowell's cousin SARAH PAYNE STUART recalls the daffy ruined aristocracy of their dynastic Boston family in My First Cousin Once Removed (HarperCollins). PHOEBE HOBAN takes a stab at the mythology of artist-demigod JeanMichel Basquiat in Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Viking). The irresistible Philippe Halsman: A Retrospective (Bulfinch) showcases the work of the masterly and playful photographer famous for his portraits of Dali, Einstein, and Monroe and his candid snaps of Nixon, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and other luminaries caught midjump. The oeuvre of Uber-fashion photographer HELMUT NEWTON, champion of bitch goddesses in spike heels, is collected in Contents Unknown 1959-1998 (Scalo). As your lawyer, I recommend an obscene number of hits off artist RALPH STEADMAN'SGonzo: The Art (Harcourt Brace), a depraved wallow in 30 years of paranoid, mind-warping illustrated social commentary. Fear and raving in the San Juan tropics: HUNTER S. THOMPSON'SThe Rum Diary (Simon & Schuster) is the longlost, basement-buried work of Steadman's mentor in madness. In SUSAN MINOT'S elegiac novel Evening (Knopf), a past love haunts and consoles the mind of a dying woman. MARVIN HEIFERMAN and CAROLE KISMARIC'SThe Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (Fireside) sniffs out the sociocultural appeal of those squeaky-clean teenage Nosey Parkers. For that hard-tobuy-for theater junkie, JAMES McMULLAN'SThe Theater Posters of James McMullan (Penguin Studio) collects more than 20 years' worth of his innovative and inspired posters for productions from Anna Christie to Six Degrees of Separation. Oh, to have loved and lost, and lived to read about it: clasp to your fluttering bosom The Handbook of Heartbreak (Rob Weisbach Books), in which poet laureate ROBERT PINSKY combs the shores of sadness for timeless odes of romantic woe, and lovesick sestinas from great sufferers such as Yeats, Shakespeare, and Plath. Be still, my beating heart!

ELISSA SCHAPPELL