HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

FANFAIR

With the empire in veritable ruins, the English seek to define what makes them special. What makes them so pathologically polite, discreet to a fault, unflappable, acutely anxious, and weirdly asexual? What is their fascination with tweed, tea, and spanking—or "le vice anglais"!Jeremy Paxman's irrepressibly witty bit of Anglo scholarship The English (Overlook) offers stirring insights.

Also this month: Push back your covers and put away your flashlights, Potter-heads—he’s back (and the folks at Scholastic books really need ruby-studded pocket protectors), so poach Mommy’s gold card and snatch up J. K. Rowling'sHarry Potter IV. Barry Miles waxes poetic about The Beat Hotel (Grove), a regular Beatnik frat house on the Left Bank, where Burroughs was inspired to finish his Naked Lunch and Ginsberg commenced to Howl. Everybody Wang Shuo tonight: in Please Don't Cal! Me Human (Hyperion), Shuo, the progenitor of China’s “hooligan literature” (all his books are banned in China), launches a satirical attack in which countries compete in the Olympics on the basis of their capacity for humiliation. In The Best of “The Nation” (Nation Books), publisher Victor Navasky and editor Katrina vanden Heuvel mine the past decade for the magazine’s most provocative and entertaining moments. In Sister (St. Martin’s), daughter Apple Parish Bartlett and granddaughter Susan Bartlett Crater salute Sister Parish, the grand doyenne of interior design, who plumped the pillows of Camclot and sowed the “American Country” look long before Ralph and Tommy.

Editor Brad Collins raises the roof on the lisp-engendering New York architecture firm Gwathmey Siegel (Universe). It’s a 90s fatty-fiction flashback William T. Vollmann weighs in with a hulking volume. The Royal Family (Viking), about an interfamily love triangle. Pneumonic plagues, Ebola, multi-culti boy bands ... Oh, what is the point of even going on! Newsday’s health and science writer Laurie Garrett makes you sick with fear in Betrayal of Trust (Hyperion), an expose of public-health catastrophes present and just waiting to happen. In Marcel Breuer (Monacelli), Robert F. Gatje remembers the architect who designed the Whitney Museum of American Art and made concrete king. In The Name of the World (HarperCollins), Denis Johnson, twisted poet of the phantasmagorical, possesses the soul of a father and husband consumed with grief after the death of his wife and daughter. Ken Steacy details Brightwork (Chronicle), the spifly chrome gewgaws that made cars from the 30s, 40s, and 50s classics. David McCarthy recalls when pop culture and kitsch collided, unleashing the Pop Art (Cambridge) revolution. Two mystery-writing virgins: Tucker Malarkey magically debuts with An Obvious Enchantment (Random House), and John Sedgwick gets spooky with The Dark House (HarperCollins). Psychotherapist Amy Bloom crafts sentences with a diamond cutter’s precision; her new collection, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (Random House), fairly gleams. Harvey Wang’s portraits of missionaries, madmen, and hustlers decorate Stacy Abramson and David Isay'sFlophouse (Random House), a testament to a soon-tobe-extinct New York subculture, the Bowery flophouse. The righteous, thoroughly American Karen Karbo delivers a swift kick in the kegels to those sappy What to Expect When You're Expecting moms in her funny and appallingly honest novel Motherhood Made a Man out of Me (Bloomsbury). Brilliant!