Hot Type

Vespa reading for the a-go-go set. Chic and beguiling amorality suffuses JEAN DOUCHET'SFrench New Wave (D.A.P.), which recalls the collaborators, co-agitators, and auteurs of the 60s nouvelle vague gang responsible for hipster films such as Breathless, Jules and Jim, and The 400 Blows.

Also this month: Dishy Wall Street Journal reporter TERI AGINS'SThe End of Fashion (Morrow) rips into the seamy underbelly of a world where marketing is king, and often the emperor has no clothes. The eclectic collages, paintings, and installation pieces of avant-garde artist Candy Jernigan, which had languished in a basement after her death, are brought to life by LAURIE DOLPHIN in Evidence (Chronicle). MICHAEL FRAYN'S rollicking novel Headlong (Metropolitan) plunges readers into a husband's mad quest to pinch a painting and woo back his wife. In an expanded version of The Terrible Hours (HarperCollins),

PETER MAAS revisits his gripping 1966 true-rescue account in which a W.W. II submarine lies flooded on the North Atlantic floor. JILL ROBINSON'S memoir of amnesia, Past Forgetting (HarperCollins), is the astounding chronicle of her journey to recover her memory. Finally, a book to bump Angela's Ashes off the best-seller list: rascally FRANK McCOURT'S sequel,'Tis (Scribner), which takes our raconteur from impoverished immigrant to storyteller and teacher. MIKE and SUE RICHARDSON plundered Christie's vintage-toy collection for Wheels (Chronicle), a miniature speedsters' paradise alley. Go Dutch! (Random House): EDMUND MORRIS saddles up the mythos of the great don'tworry-be-happy president, Ronald Reagan. An escapee from a Georgia island colony of human clones sends chills through veteran New York Times journalist JOHN DARNTON'S thriller The Experiment (Dutton). A foreign student vanishes from her South African boarding school in SHEILA KOHLER'S erotic and disturbing Cracks (Zoland). JOHN NATHAN pierces the inner sanctum of the Japanese electronics giant in Sony (Houghton Mifflin). Working from the findings of maverick criminologist Dr. Lonnie Athens, RICHARD RHODES reveals commonalities of violent criminals in Why They Kill (Knopf). The Spectator (New Press) compiles 45 years' worth of oral historian STUDS TERKEL'S radio interviews, including Buster Keaton waxing poetic on the art of improvisation and Fellini pondering honesty in art. It's a family affair: husband-and-wife team SUSAN E. TIFFT and ALEX S. JONES take on the Sulzberger dynasty behind The New York Times in The Trust (Little, Brown). SUNEETA PERES DA COSTA offers a slice of modern magic realism in Homework (Bloomsbury), about an adolescent heroine with sensitive antenna-like protrusions atop her head. JOHN TYTELL'SParadise Outlaws (Morrow) is the original Beat scholar's Roman candle of a memoir, dosed with anecdote, lit crit, and spectacular Mellon photos of Big Daddies such as Burroughs and Ginsberg. Go ahead, pull my daisy.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL