Hot Type

f pages, like neckties, are any indication of a gentleman's virility, consider the Valentine possibilities of DAVID FOSTER WALLACE and his manly new novel, Infinite Jest (Little, Brown). At 1,088 pages (including endnotes), this brilliant epic comedy of Pynchonesque proportions stars a loony family of geniuses, and raises a brow at a pleasure-obsessed society hell-bent on ruin. Other literary tokens of love: The discontented gay hero of STEPHEN McCAULEY'S endearing The Man of the House (Simon & Schuster) finds his life turned upside down when his straight roommate's ex appears with a suspicious-looking child in tow. RICHARD DAVENPORTHINES'S biography Auden (Pantheon) is a rather cheeky look at the great English poet's life and work, from his Benzedrine addiction to the writing of "The Age of Anxiety." In The Captain's Fire (Knopf), J. S. MARCUS'S perversely funny novel set in Berlin, the bisexual hero finds himself growing larger and larger. The dramatic story of the first major expedition into the American West is examined in STEPHEN AMBROSE'S Undaunted Courage (Simon & Schuster). GREGOR VON REZZORI goes back to his Bukovina roots for his second memoir, Anecdotage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). SEBASTIAN FAULKS'S gripping novel Birdsong (Random House) puts us deep in the trenches of the First World War. The willful daughter of a housekeeper comes of age in the mansion of a taxidermist in JOANNA SCOTT'S richly imaginative The Manikin (Henry Holt). A tycoon's murder is the riddle that haunts A. N. WILSON'S Hearing Voices (Norton). DOROTHEA LANGE'S oeuvre, from her Depression-era work that made her famous to her globe-trotting travel snaps, is featured in Photographs of a Lifetime (Aperture). Will the Milquetoast Ph.D. in WILLIAM BALDWIN'S satirical The Fennel Family Papers (Algonquin) perish before he can publish? Playwright CHRISTOPHER DURANG'S Twenty-Seven Short Plays (Smith and Kraus) is outlandishly funny. Reimagine your modest digs as, say, a Bedouin tent or a treacly castle through the expert vision of MIN HOGG and WENDY HARROP'S Interiors (Clarkson Potter). And if English Country makes you weak in the knees, then treat yourself to ROBERT BECKER'S bio, Nancy Lancaster: Her Life, Her World, Her Art (Knopf), which celebrates the godmother of chintz's decorating philosophy and life. Big kiss.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL