HOT TYPE

ELISSA SCHAPPELL

Upon turning 80, Norman Mailer, most fully alive and at the height of his powers when pissing people off, expounds on the pitfalls of early success, the necessity of work habits, and other fine points of the writer's craft, also known as The Spooky Art (Random House).

Also this month: Merv Griffin and David Bender take on Act II of the former talk-show host's life in Merv (Simon & Schuster). Bob Schieffer faces the nation in This Just In (Putnam). Pete Hamill's new novel is entitled Forever (Little, Brown)—now he and Judy Blume have something else in common!

Hunter S. Thompson, the Godfather of Gonzo, turns pro in his scorching memoir Kingdom of Fear (Simon & Schuster). Gossip queen Cindy Adams's The Gift of Jazzy (St. Martin's) tells how, after losing her husband, Cindy found solace in the arms—er, front legs— of a tiny dog. The big daddy of American crime novelists Elmore Leonard's newest is When the Women Come Out to Dance (Morrow). In Pushkin's Children (Mariner), Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya turns her eye to the Soviet temperament, the Great Terror, and the bliss of snow. Carrie Fisher, one of our most painfully hilarious correspondents from the edge of sanity, returns with The Best Awful There Is (Simon & Schuster). Mourning the demise of the great Old West, the folks in Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole (Scribner) battle to hold fast to a dying past. The pre-dawn musings of a medical-textbook editor fill novelist Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches (Random House). Get swept away by Pico Iyer's swoony romantic novel, Abandon (Knopf). The civil-rights movement, comic books, and the Holocaust all come together in Jay Cantor's long-awaited novel, Great Neck (Knopf). A. S. Byatt's A Whistling Woman (Knopf) is a sexy, spine-tingling novel suffused with scientific discoveries and ethical conflicts. In City of Secrets (Morrow), John Follain reveals the truth behind the 1998 murders at the Vatican. Richard Price's page-turner Samaritan (Knopf) is a literary suspense novel of crime and punishment. Photographer Rondal Partridge's career is illumed in Elizabeth Partridge and Sally Stein's Quizzical Eye (Heyday).

In Glyn Vincent's The Unknown Night (Grove), schizophrenic painter R. A. Blakelock confesses to his doctor, "I can't make them fast enough." William F. Pepper posits in An Act of State (Verso) that the F.B.I., the military, and a pro-war American government all colluded to execute the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

In The Art of Fred Marcellino (Pulcinella), Nicholas Falletta remembers the celebrated illustrator and designer. Richard Cohen lives and writes By the Sword (Random House). David Cannadine confronts how the perceptions of a glorious past haunt modern Britain In Churchill's Shadow (Oxford). The unpublished poems of America's most esteemed barfly poet, the late Charles Bukowski, surface in Sifting Through the Madness for the Word the Line the Way (Ecco). To all my friends!