Desperate living. The L.A. tourist bureau might want to offer Bret Easton Ellis hush money lest the City of Angels be renamed the City of Zombies. On the 25th anniversary of his culture-branding novel, Less them Zero, Ellis checks in with Clay, now a screenwriter, and the rest of Zero’s cast of morally wasted youths, who’ve become denizens of the entertainment industry. As our hero’s chronic disillusionment and propensity for betrayal turn into Stage Four cancer of the soul, Imperial Bedrooms (Knopf) assumes the terror and authenticity of a comic snuff film.

Justin Spring outs professor, poet, and novelist Samuel Steward, ne Phil Sparrow, a pre-Stonewall Secret Historian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), sexual outlaw, tattoo artist to the Hell’s Angels, and invaluable Kinsey resource whose “stud list” records trysts with Rudolf Valentino and Rock Hudson. Future imperfect: in The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown), Rick Moody's rollicking shaggy-dog novel (a mixed breed of science fiction and satire), a sorry writer bangs out the novelization of a campy 60s horror film, while a severed human arm, the sole survivor of an ill-starred mission to Mars, creeps across the desert. Bill Morgan and David Stanford'sJack Kerouac and Allen Gins burg: The Letters (Viking) collects the intimate correspondence between the Beat Generation’s two most influential writers and friends from 1944 to 1963, when they were at the peak of their creative powers. The dystopian vision of American absurdist Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story (Random House) may put a comic face on the future (the face of Big Brother is a cartoon otter), but the growing threat caused by rampant anti-intellectualism, media obsession, and the possibility that China will call in our IOU is chilling. Four economically endangered ladies-of-influence rise up in C.E.O.-socialite Alexandra Lebenthal's The Recessionistas (Grand Central). Roller girls Alex "Axles of Evil" Cohen and Jennifer "Kasey Bomber" Barbee deliver the slamming Down and Derby (Soft Skull). Wanna create your COMM m own Roller Derby nom de pummel? Take the name of a fave public figure and badassify it with some violent emotion or action. Like Madeleine Albright, Susan B. Agony, or Cyndi Lopper’-head-off.... Call me “Virginia Woolf-in-sheeps-clothing.”

IN SHORT, BUT ALL FONDNESS

Kate Reardon shows Your Mother Was Right (Three Rivers). Rosanne Cash is Composed (Viking). Eliza Griswold plumbs The Tenth Porollel (Farrar, Strous and Giroux) Malcolm Beith outs The Last Norco (Grove). Susan Fales-Hill debuts One Flight Up (Atria). Anthony Doerr's stories scale the Memory Wall (Scribner) Monique Truong's tale is Bitter in the Mouth (Random House). Howard Norman is at war with What Is Left the Daughter (Houghton Mifflin).