Hot Type

With his Pre-Raphaelite hair and his scabrous public behavior, waving a beer bottle at you forcibly while gently reminding you that he's homosexual, choreographer Mark Morris has always seemed a study in contradiction. Dance critic JOAN ACOCELLA'S part biography, part critical study, Mark Morris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), limns the inherent paradoxes at work in Morris and his dances. Creating a full-blooded portrait of an artist whose work is by turns traditional and radical, Acocella shines light on the man whose bouts of outspokenness once moved the general director of his dance company to say, "Sometimes I feel like the man who walks around with the shovel behind the elephant.''

Also this month: A revered author is offered a small fortune to write his memoirs in BENJAMIN CHEEVER'S comic novel The Partisan (Atheneum). A Japanese man and an American man, raised as blood brothers, figure out the secret of Pearl Harbor in FRANK DEFORD'S new novel, Love and Infamy (Viking). GILLES MORA'S Walker Evans (Abrams) is the first complete Evans retrospective to appear in print. Splendours and Miseries (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is SARAH BRADFORD'S biography of the eccentric Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. A college instructor sues a Hollywood producer in WILLIAM GADDIS'S novel A Frolic of His Own (Poseidon). ROY LICHTENSTEIN and TONY HENDRA tell the story of a frustrated artist in their art comic book, Brad '61: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Pantheon). SEAN KELLY and ROSEMARY ROGERS identify the patron saints of everything from jaundice to earthquakes in Saints Preserve Us (Random House). JOHN CAREY assaults the literary intelligentsia of 1880-1939 in The Intellectuals and the Masses (St. Martin's). HERMAN WOUK recounts the saga of Israel in The Hope (Little, Brown). DAN FRANCK tells the story of a Parisian trying to save his troubled marriage in Separation (Knopf). The Hat Book (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), designed by LESLIE SMOLAN, features RODNEY SMITH'S exquisite millinery photographs. And MARVIN TRAUB and TOM TEICHOLZ'S Like No Other Store . . . (Times Books) plants a large wet kiss on the legend that is Bloomingdale's.

HENRY ALFORD