Hot Type

It's almost fall, darlings, high time to jump-start that glorious gray glob you call a brain. The trick? HELEN SCHULMAN'S wildly imaginative novel The Revisionist (Crown), a blackly comic, pitch-perfect tour de force about a Jewish neurologist obsessed with a famous Holocaust denier.

Also this month: The portraits in HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON'STete a Tete (Bulfinch) are icon-a-icon mug shots of such cultural institutions as Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, and Pablo Picasso. Historian ERIC HOBSBAWM'SUncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz (New Press) features essays on the birth of the British working class, the cultural consequences of Christopher Columbus, and the link between revolution and sex. Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945-1989, by JEREMY ISAACS and TAYLOR DOWNING (Little, Brown), relives all the dramatic paranoia of the era of Dr. Strangelove from Castro and Sputnik to Gorby and perestroika. Heavy-hitting Vietnam War novelist TIM O'BRIEN now turns his big guns on the battle between the sexes in Tomcat in Love (Broadway). WILLIAM WELD, the boyish Massachusetts ex-governor and presidential pretender, debuts with Mackerel by Moonlight (Simon & Schuster). Beware the Shangri-la syndrome—all that glitters in the Far East is not religion: The Spiritual Tourist (Bloomsbury) is MICK BROWN'S "personal odyssey through the outer reaches of belief." A young war-shocked Korean man falls for a comely southern belle with secrets of her own in SUSAN CHOI'S elegantly wrought first novel, The Foreign Student (HarperFlamingo). Don't be too late; get your hands on FRANCO COLOGNI'SCartier: The Tank Watch (Flammarion), an illustrated history of the Cartier classic that forever changed the face of watchmaking. Fashion photographer-provocateur MARIO TESTINO heartily captures the absurd and arresting in Any Objections? (Phaidon). Dust Bowl shutterbug DOROTHEA LANGE'SPhotographs of a Lifetime early years shooting studio portraits spression-era farm families. Twin brothe an Orthodox yeshiva student, each lging in MICHAEL LOWENTHAL'S moving 'race (Dutton). JAMES WILCOX'S comic :/ (Little, Brown) stars a newly outed iddle-aged man whose quest for love is derailed by a wacky ex-wife, a synchronized swimmer, and a coterie of nattering gay matchmakers. LORRIE MOORE, one of our finest short-fiction writers, presents Birds of America (Knopf), a collection of compassionate and savagely funny stories. In Acheson (Simon & Schuster), JAMES CHACE recalls how Truman's controversial foreign-affairs wise man and secretary of state helped Fight the Cold War. Because you've been promising to read something weighty this fall: MICHAEL HOLROYD'SBernard Shaw (Random House) reduces the awesome, biceps-busting, multivolume, landmark bio into one volume, accessible to even the most A.D.D.-afflicted among us. Speak softly and carry a big book.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL