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In JOHN IRVING'SA Widow for One Year (Random House) a beautiful mother who is grieving the tragic death of her two HI sons, the philandering of her husband, and her own affair with a teenager abandons her young daughter in a wonderfully disturbing comic novel about the persistence of passion and the erotic geometry of grief and attraction.

Also this month: The evolution of museum architecture is examined in VICTORIA NEWHOUSE'S insightful Towards a New Museum (Monacelli). In the Kennedy Style (Doubleday) is Jackie O's former chief of staff LETITIA BALDRIGE'S compendium of the guest lists, menus, and delicious gossip from the most memorable parties of the J.F.K. administration. Speaking with Strangers (Houghton Mifflin) is the final installment of MARY CANTWELL'S sparkling memoir trilogy. NORMAN MAILER recounts 50 years of war, boxing, wife stabbing, and other blood sports in The Time of Our Time (Random House). In KAREN MOLINE'SBelladonna (Warner) a young woman once held captive by a coterie of sadistic aristocrats wreaks exquisite revenge. The young lawyer-writer phenom BRAD MELTZER pits husband and wife attorneys against each other in the beach-ready thriller Dead Even (Rob Weisbach Books). RUSSELL MILLER'SMagnum (Grove) celebrates the co-op photo agency, peopled with an extraordinary collection of oddballs and hotheads who saw and shot the world. The hilarious and unnerving short stories in DAVID GILBERT'S debut collection, Remote Feed (Scribner), buzz with an electrifying wit. ALLON SCHOENER'SNew York: An Illustrated History of the People (Norton) is a pictorial history of the melting-pot city. Historic images such as the raising of the American flag over I wo Jima are captured in Flash! The Associated Press Covers the World (Abrams). Photographer and illustrator MICHAEL ROBERTS creates an astonishingly beautiful African alphabet in The Jungle ABC (Callaway/Hyperion). A Century of Arts and Letters (Columbia University Press), edited by JOHN UPDIKE, toasts 100 years of the cultural elite's intellectual feuding over who is worthy of membership in the venerable academy. A fledgling fashion designer and cheeky party crasher becomes embroiled in a murder investigation in SHIRLEY LORD'SThe Crasher (Warner). The amazing life of Superman, from actor to activist for spinal-cord-injury research, is celebrated in Still Me (Random House), by CHRISTOPHER REEVE.Stuart Davis (Bulfinch), edited by PHILIP RYLANDS, features the modernist painter's jazzy vanguard paintings. The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (Crown) is a collection of the transcendent stories of STEVEN MILLHAUSER. For Mother's Day: in the inspiring and heart-wrenching Wanting a Child (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), edited by HELEN SCHULMAN and JILL BIALOSKY, writers share the unspoken truths of infertility, adoption, and miscarriage in their quest for parenthood by any means necessary. Love you, Mom.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL