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JANTHONY LUKAS'S engaging true-crime thriller, Big Trouble (Simon & Schuster), finished shortly before his June death, spins the wheel of time back to the turn -ofthe-century murder of a former Idaho governor, embroiling legendary dick Pinkerton James McParlan and Clarence Darrow, defender of the great unwashed. Also this month: In TAG Heuer: Mastering Time (Assouline), GISBERT L. BRUNNER records with jewel-like precision the work of the luxury European watchmaker. WILL SELF'SGreat Apes (Grove) is a fur-flying satire of Swiftian proportions in which all London has been transformed into a planet of the apes. The masterful short stories in DEBORAH EISENBERG'SAll Around Atlantis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) focus on troubled souls loosed from their moorings. A little boy dukes it out with comic-book foes like pirates, Martians, and mountain lions in JULES FEIFFER'S picture book, Meanwhile ... (HarperCollins). Crown SANDRA TSING LOH the acerbic queen of the Crate & Barrel crowd—her witty novel, If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now (Riverhead), stars a parade of irony-afflicted, insuranceless Gen-Xers who dream of hitting the big time in L.A. or at least owning a sofa. An eccentric writer flees her familiar middle-class life in the venerable MARGARET DRABBLE'S enchanting novel The Witch of Exmoor (Harcourt Brace). Baby-boomers, reach for your wallets: BILL GEIST'SThe Big Five-Oh! (Morrow) is a riotous look at boomer bummers such as the urge to own a motorcycle, being the oldest person at a concert, and—horror of horrors—buying relaxed-fit jeans. On History (New Press) collects the best essays of eminent British historian ERIC HOBSBAWM. EDMUND WHITE'S The Farewell Symphony (Knopf) is the final installment in his elegiac autobiographical trilogy. W. C. Fields, the peerless comic and outlandish self-mythologizer, comes to life in SIMON LOUVISH'SMan on the Flying Trapeze (Norton). In Gordon Conway: Fashioning a New Woman (University of Texas), RAYE VIRGINIA ALLEN etches the history of the Jazz Age Vanity Fair illustrator who captured the heat and elegance of flapper-era beauties. ANDREW and LESLIE COCKBURN reveal the potential dangers of the former Soviet Union's nuclear stockpile in One Point Safe (Anchor). A mother and daughter take a revealing road trip through the 1950s South in SUSAN THAMES'S poignant first novel, I'll Be Home Late Tonight (Villard). MARTIN KNELMAN'SLaughing on the Outside (St. Martin's) celebrates the genius of the late Canadian funnyman John Candy. DENIS JOHNSON'SAlready Dead (HarperCollins) features a Faulknerian tapestry of outsiders, misfits, and lowlifes. Artist DAMIEN HIRST, renowned for floating expired creatures in formaldehyde, opens up his head in / Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (Monacelli). It's an ad, ad, ad, ad world: DAVID BERNSTEIN'SAdvertising Outdoors (Phaidon) celebrates the ingenuity of billboards from Roman murals shilling wine to Times Square billboards selling smokes, sex, and sin. And, finally, SEALE BALLINGER beatifies the spitfires, jezebels, and steel magnolias of the New and Old South in Hell's Belles (Conari Press), which includes honorary southern belle Truman Capote's bon mot "I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true." Amen!

ELISSA SCHAPPELL