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Weary of beer blasts and beach books that are the literary equivalent of a corn dog? Evince effortless end-of-summer sophistication by using PHILIP HOARE'S Noel Coward: A Biography (Simon & Schuster) as a cocktail tray. Better still, commit it to memory and drop it into dry and scathingly witty cocktailparty banter whilst stabbing olives and the occasional deserving back.

Fire Island beach reading: You go, girl! JULIAN FLEISHER points out the watering holes, mating calls, identifiable markings, and plumage of The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide (Riverhead). DAVID MIXNER, the prominent gay fund-raiser and friend of President Clinton's, candidly shares his 25 years behind the lines toiling for civil and gay rights in Stranger Among Friends (Bantam). Hollywood, from its "H.I.V.I.P.'s" to its devious dermatologists, is laid waste in BRUCE WAGNER'S wild and mercilessly funny I'm Losing You (Villard). CORIN REDGRAVE, brother of Vanessa and Lynn, recalls the life and bisexual loves of the thespian dynasty's revered patriarch in Michael Redgrave: My Father (Richard Cohen Books).

The gOOCj5 the bad, and the ugly: NELSON D. LANKFORD tips his hat to diplomat, spymaster, and country gentleman David K. E. Bruce in The Last American Aristocrat (Little, Brown). Finding a Form (Knopf) is literary big man WILLIAM H. GASS'S third collection of inventive and inspiring essays on art, culture, nature, and writing. CHRISTOPHER S. WREN'S Hacks (Simon & Schuster) is a satirical skewering of foreign correspondents chasing stories and tail in a war zone. In The Road to Hell (Grove/ Atlantic) PAUL LIBERATORE probes the bloody link between white radical lawyer Stephen Bingham and his Black Panther client George Jackson, who led the infamous San Quentin massacre. Spooky goth novelist JOYCE CAROL OATES flirts with unnatural attraction in her maiden illustrated novella, First Love (Ecco). The work of the self-taught visionaries of the outsider art movement is the subject of Raw Creation (Phaidon), by JOHN MAIZEL. And the late brutish actor KLAUS KINSKI was an unrepentant defiler of under-age girls and force of (bad) nature, according to the appallingly fascinating Kinski Uncut: The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (Viking). Quick, martini me!

ELISSA SCHAPPELL