Hot Type

Must be the season of the witch: PATRICIA PEARSON effectively cremates the myth of innate female innocence by parading a violent chain gang of gals gone wrong in the compelling JLTJCAZ She Was Bad (Viking).

Also this month: DARCEY STEINKE drags you to the edge and forces you to peer into the murky abyss that is suburbia in Jesus Saves (Atlantic Monthly Press). What—me worry? The lusty lampooners of culture at that whoopee cushion of satire MAD magazine dust off some of their best from the era of Ike in MAD About the Fifties (Little, Brown). MARK LEYNER-who can be amusing to the point where it seems almost sadistic-presents his third novel, The Tetherballs of Bougainville (Harmony). CHRISTA WOLF, one of Germany's foremost intellectuals, divulges her personal post-Wall trauma in Parting from Phantoms (University of Chicago). From elegant uptown to arty downtown, CHESSY RAYNER'S New York: Trends and Traditions (Monacelli) toasts the architectural interiors of the Big Apple. In God and the American Writer (Knopf) the unstoppable ALFRED KAZIN ruminates on how writers such as Eliot, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Faulkner got religion in their work. Two blue-blooded British ostrich ranchers go to South Africa to make their fortune, and are drawn into a surreal cauldron of sexual impropriety in ANNE LANDSMAN'S first novel, The Devil's Chimney (Soho Press). DAYTON DUNCAN and KEN BURNS'S Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (Knopf) chronicles how Lewis and Clark headed up a mission to find the Northwest Passage, only to discover land, land, and more land. Paris in the Fifties (Times Books) is journalist STANLEY KARNOW'S glittering memoir of his days in the City of Light. DORIS LESSING recounts her bohemian phase in volume two of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (HarperCollins). STEPHEN GAN, the big daddy of oversize designer mags, offers up Visionaire's Fashion 2000 (Universe), edited by ALIX BROWNE. In The Crystal Frontier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Mexico's man of letters CARLOS FUENTES spins a Balzacian novel in nine masterly stories. HUGH MONTGOMERY-MASSINGBERD and lensman CHRISTOPHER SIMON SYKES conduct a grand house tour of the Highlands' most opulent abodes in Great Houses of Scotland (Rizzoli). The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (Abrams) celebrates the husbandand-wife design team who strove to better society by building beautiful, functional furniture. Dull dinner party? Let your inner caterer create: JOOST ELFFERS shows how to craft a virtual menagerie of gustatory delights in Play with Your Food (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). From Puritan Puffs to Flounder Wheels, ALEXANDRA WENTWORTH'S The WASP Cookbook (Warner) is proof that Wasps do ingest more than Milanos, Triscuits, and gin. Trick or treat? Yikes, it's JOAN COLLINS! The celebrity novelist" opens a vein and lets the gossip flow in her hilarious autobiography Second Act (St. Martin's). Now, where did I park my broom?

ELISSA SCHAPPELL