HOT TYPE

The 2000s, music critic Simon Reynolds argues in Retromania (Faber and Faber), should be dubbed the "Re" decade: the age of revivals, reunion tours, and slavish sequels, of sampling and mashups, reissues, and fetishistic commemorative box sets. Is imagination dead, as Reynolds fears, or did someone just slip it a roofie? In the same groove, Western culture's crippling obsession with celebrity and the hazards of mass media and technology drive the late J. G. Ballard's fiction. With the posthumous publication of Millennium People (Norton), the father of cyberpunk goes out with a Ballardian bang. In the key of family: Sapphire picks up where Push stopped with The Kid (Penguin), the story of Precious's son. Michael Sims goes back to Zuckerman's farm, to weave The Story of Charlotte's Web (Walker). In The Suspension of Time (Milkweed), 44 writers, performers, and composers chart the universe contained in Simon Dinnerstein'sThe Fulbright Triptych, an evocative modernist, figurative portrait of father, mother, and child—a tableau, a landscape, a still life, a meditation on the creation of art, inspiration, influence, and the family. The murder of an attractive but chilly coed at an elite private school ensnares the entire community in Charlotte Bacon'sThe Twisted Thread (Hyperion). Alice La Plante's riveting Turn of Mind (Atlantic Monthly Press) assumes the shifting points of view of a woman suffering from dementia who is suspected of killing her best friend. Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg catalogue history's most notorious art heists in Stealing Rembrandts (Palgrave Macmillan).

ELISSA SCHAPPELL

Carmelu Ciuraru pens the history of the Nom de Plume (Harper). Alison Thompson documents her relief efforts abroad in The Third Wave (Spiegel & Grau). Paul Farmer surveys Haiti After the Earthquake (PublicAffairs). Two society girls go west in Dorothy Wickenden'sNothing Daunted (Scribner). Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz correspond in Sarah Greenough'sMy Faraway One (Yale). Gully Wells remembers Mama and The House in France (Knopf). Jason Zinoman goes for the Shock Value (Penguin). Paul Collins executes The Murder of the Century (Crown). Wayne Koestenbaum feels our pain in Humiliation (Picador). Ben Mezrich depicts Sex on the Moon (Doubleday). Christopher Turner gets turned on in Adventures in the Orgasmatron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Craig Kellogg showcases top-drawer antique Dealer's Choice homes (Architecture/Interiors Press).

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