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In JAMES WILCOX'S new comic novel, Guest of a Sinner (HarperCoIlins), a group of New Yorkers try to reanimate their enervated lives. PHILIP KERR'S thriller set in London in the year 2013, A Philosophical Investigation (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), portrays a serial killer with similarities to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Critic ROBERT HUGHES lambastes the art world, P.C., and Ronald Reagan in his polemic Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (Oxford). The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America's Greatest Lawyer (Times Books), by GEOFFREY COWAN, details Darrow's own trial for jury tampering during the murder trial of a labor activist in 1911. In ANDREW VACHSS'Snew novel, a killer sprung from jail searches for the only person who ever broke through his shell of steely indifference—a strip-dancer named Shelia (Knopf). Notes from Underground (Hyperion) consists of two of actor-writer ERIC BOGOSIAN'S darkly comic monologues. Man Bites Town (St. Martin's) consists of many of actor-writer HARRY SHEARER'S darkly comic thoughts about life and Los Angeles. While at a good-bye lunch with his mistress, the protagonist of author and screenwriter (The Player) MICHAEL TOLKIN'S new novel, Among the Dead (Morrow), misses the plane that ends up crashing and killing his wife. In his novel Obabakoak (Pantheon), BERNARDO ATXAGA chronicles life in a Basque village. The Man Who Stayed Behind (Simon & Schuster), by SIDNEY RITTENBERG and AMANDA BENNETT, tells how Rittenberg, an American, lived in China from 1945 to 1980, first as a fervent member of the Chinese Communist Party and later as a party dissident forced to spend 10 years in solitary confinement. ANNA QUINDLEN'S best New York Times columns are collected in Thinking Out Loud (Random House). Journalist SUSAN SQUIRE follows five married couples from pregnancy through the first postpartum year in For Better, for Worse: A Candid Chronicle of Five Couples Adjusting to Parenthood (Doubleday). And True Hallucinations (HarperSanFrancisco) charts ethnomedicine expert TERENCE MCKENNA'S 1971 expedition to the Amazon Basin in search of a mythical shamanistic hallucinogen.

HENRY ALFORD