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Don't even think of leaving for the beach without FRANCINE PROSE'S sinfully funny Hunters and Gatherers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a wicked satire about an uptight fact checker at a frothy women's magazine who is drawn into a goddess-worshiping cult on Fire Island after she saves its accident-prone New Age high priestess from drowning.

And what's better than other people's misery for perfect hammock reading? Parasitic miscreants comb through the remains of a Florida town torn asunder by a hurricane in CARL HIAASEN'S Stormy Weather (Knopf). RICK MOODY'S intense and unnerving short-story collection, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (Little, Brown), is a narcotizing tour de force of sex, drugs, and dementia. Four hapless lads packed off to reform school are brutalized by sadistic guards, only to exact their revenge a decade later, in LORENZO CARCATERRA'S riveting Sleepers (Ballantine). A lonely Irish divorcee with three kids is a sitting duck for the advances of a treacherous huckster in MARY McGARRY MORRIS'S saga. Songs in Ordinary Time (Viking). MARK FROST'S chilling page-turner The 6 Messiahs (Morrow) features Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A good daughter deals with the death of a difficult dad in DELIA EPHRON'S bittersweet Hanging Up (Putnam).

Other August notables: The mother of all nuclear bombs is exposed in RICHARD RHODES'S Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon & Schuster). Fashion gurus AMY FINE COLLINS and OLIVIA GOLDSMITH show you the shining path to personal style in Simple Isn't Easy (HarperCollins). From Brownie uniform to second wedding dress, the true story of Anywoman ILENE BECKERMAN'S life is chronicled through the contents of her closet in Love, Loss, and What I Wore (Algonquin). And, finally, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, and Malcolm X, as well as other residents of the cultural capital of black America, come alive in ALLON SCHOENER'S remarkable Harlem on My Mind (New Press), a reprint of the companion book to the controversial 1969 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL