Hot Type

Soothe that cabin fever with a bit of end-ofwinter whimsy: DEBORAH SOLOMON'S Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) offers rare insight into the genius and life of the reclusive pack-rat artist who lived with his mother and handicapped brother in Queens, dreaming of ballerinas and creating his poetic, elegiac shadow boxes out of bird feathers, marbles, and dime-store trinkets.

Also this month: LEONARD GARMENT scats about his life as a swinging jazz musician turned attorney who got caught up in politics—and, ultimately, Watergate—in Crazy Rhythm (Times Books). MTV-lit goddess MAGGIE ESTEP channel-surfs for metaphors in her first novel, Diary of an Emotional Idiot (Harmony). A Place of My Own (Random House) follows writer-editor MICHAEL POLLAN'S philosophical journey from conceiving a "shelter for daydreams" to his actual Mr. Blandings-like escapades in building his dream house. Reissued in book form after nearly 20 years, former New Yorker writer GEORGE W. S. TROW'S eerily prescient essay Within the Context of No Context (Atlantic Monthly Press) picks clean the bones of 20thcentury American culture. A proper English barrister's smallvillage life is disrupted when his Communist brother returns home in ROBERT McCRUM'S Suspicion (Norton). From the painter's early obsession with grids and dots to his more representational work, art critic JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR provides a mid-career report card on Bill Jacklin (Phaidon). Finally they've loosened their grubby little jeweled fingers, and now all the world can relish EDWARD STEICHEN'S portraits from 1898 through the 1940s in Edward Steichen: The Collection of the Royal Photographic Society (Charta).

Like poetry? Let us go then, you and I, to Inventions of the March Hare (Harcourt Brace), a cache of T. S. ELIOT'S never-before-published poems and bawdy verse such as "The Triumph of Bullshit" and "Sweeney Erect." Poet JILL BIALOSKY makes an impressive debut with The End of Desire (Knopf), works infused with despair and beauty recalling a childhood and adolescence marked by the death of her father.

This month's more amusing offerings include The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (Houghton Mifflin), edited by CHARLOTTE MOSLEY, a glorious assemblage of maliciously witty missives in which Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, and the Sitwells, among others (not to mention the Roman Catholic Church, anti-Semitism, and bad grammar), take it on the chin. From cavorting at a nudist colony known for its "pudding toss" to playing migrant fancy-fruit picker in Oregon, DAVID SEDARIS lets it all hang out in Naked (Little, Brown). Pass the Butterworms (Villard) is smart-ass travel writer TIM CAHILL'S recollection of his journeys to remote places and spaces of consciousness. Visionary superstar filmmaker JACK SMITH'S camp writings and rantings are collected in Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool (High Risk), edited by J. HOBERMAN and ED LEFFINGWELL; as Smith would say, God must want to be shocked. Speaking of God (hit it, Zarathustra), billions and billions of millennium fearers will finally, it is hoped, experience some kind of closure when sci-fi monolith ARTHUR C. CLARKE beams down 3001: The Final Odyssey (Ballantine), the last installment, which will reveal all. Typeheads and fact checkers, salute your new prince, PER MOLLERUP, for compiling Marks of Excellence (Phaidon), the first-ever comprehensive taxonomy of trademarks such as name marks, abbreviations, and picture marks. Now, that's Hot Type™!

ELISSA SCHAPPELL