Hot Type

At Home with the Marquis de Sade (Simon & Schuster) isn't the cover line of a perverse home-decorating glossy but the title of FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY'S provocative biography, which reveals that the fate of the magnificently depraved marquis was controlled by his pious wife and his manipulative mother-in-law.

Also this month: An aspiring young writer offers her services as maid and whipping girl to Lillian Heilman—the lit world's own Joan Crawford-in ROSEMARY MAHONEY'S memoir, A Likely Story (Doubleday). HILARY SPURLING'SThe Unknown Matisse (Knopf) traces the sunny painter from his bleak childhood in a French textile town to his success as one of the most revered artists of the 20th century. STEPHEN E. AMBROSE once again drops us in the trenches with citizen soldiers as they fight their way from Normandy to Berlin in The Victors (Simon & Schuster). Twenty years of Versace's eyepopping ad campaigns are collected in Versace: The Naked and the Dressed (Random House). PETER JENNINGS and TODD BREWSTER collaborate on The Century (Doubleday), a sprawling compendium of you-are-there accounts of the great events of the 20th century. Legends (New World Library) features essays on extraordinary women who have forever altered the fabric of humanity. The Life and Times of R. Crumb (St. Martin's) is an homage to the underground-comix pioneer's psychedelic genius edited by MONTE BEAUCHAMP. MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM dazzles in his inspired novel The Hours (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which superbly weaves together three novellas, all linked to Virginia Woolf. In Just Jackie (Ballantine) EDWARD KLEIN pumps schoolgirl chums, Secret Service agents, and other intimates to get the dish on the superstar First Lady. DAVID REMNICK'S heavy-hitting King of the World (Random House) charts the cometlike career of Muhammad Ali. MARCO TOSA'SBarbie (Abrams) celebrates the freakishly proportioned doll, a role model to pre-teens and drag queens, and the Antichrist to feminists and P.C. parents. Opened Ground (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is a harvest of 30 years of landmark poems by Nobel-winning SEAMUS HEANEY. BARBARA LEAMING'SMarilyn Monroe (Crown) is infused with dirt gleaned from Norma Jean's shrink and agent, plus the private writings of Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, John Huston, and Laurence Olivier. R. L. WILSON, with GREG MARTIN, salutes an era when our heroes wore chaps in Buffalo Bill's Wild West (Random House). The protagonist of MARK O'DONNELL'S comic novel Let Nothing You Dismay

(Knopf) navigates six hilariously loathsome holiday parties in one day. His Airness, the immortal MICHAEL JORDAN, shoots and scores in his autobiography, For the Love of the Game (Crown). And ED SIKOV'SOn Sunset Boulevard (Hyperion) portrays Billy Wilder, one of the most intriguing and influential directors and screenwriters of all time, who drew on his tumultuous life experiences to create such classics as Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, and Some Like It Hot. I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille ...

ELISSA SCHAPPELL