HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

Aparticularly huge, almost Brobdingnagian column ... Take a lesson, you squirmy little no-byline book-reviewing gorgons with pillowcases over your heads: not only do the fine young critics and writers in The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin), edited by Laura Miller with Adam Begley, fillet their subjects with finesse and wit, but the erudite and bitchy collection of profiles, reviews, bibliographies, and writers’ reading lists also makes for compulsive reading.

In autumn, new fiction falls like oak leaves: Two fires rock the life of the Jewish heroine of Kate Wenner's novel, Setting Fires (Scribner). Head for the cellar—from out of the past, a father’s nasty secret kicks up a dust storm of trouble in Mary Morris's gothic twister, Acts of God (Picador). Elwood Reid forges into Deliverance territory with his disturbing Midnight Sun (Doubleday), in which two construction workers are lured into rescuing a girl from an Alaskan doomsday cult. Set in the greed-isgood 80s, David Leavitt's novel Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing (Houghton Mifflin) stars an ambitious young writer striving to break into the lit world and out of the closet. Eclectic quarterly concern McSweeney’s branches into book publishing with a winner, Neal Pollack's inventive and hilarious The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature (McSweeney’s).

Also this month: Cease your grieving! Cast off the bear-fur armband and toast the late Edward Gorey with his final offering. Die Iron Tonic (Harcourt). Liz Smith's memoir, Natural Blonde (Hyperion), dishes up her early life as a pony-lovin’ golden rose of Texas, and later her thrilling life as the world’s best-known and beloved gossipeuse, who sets the standard for celebrity air-kissing-and-telling. Cockfightin’, coon killin’, and feastin’ on the brains of squirrels are just a few of the American South’s hobbies saluted in the unflappable Burkhard Bilger's Noodling for Flatheads (Scribner). Play “name that basket shot” with Peggy Sirota's Guess Who (Steidl), a nosey-poke Who’s Who of cheeky celebrities flashing only snatches of themselves—an eye here, an instep there, the swell of an augmented bosom. Veteran New York magazine reporter Michael Stone's Gangbusters (Doubleday) explores N.Y.C.’s elite Homicide Investigations Unit, responsible for shutting down the nefarious Wild Cowboys street gang. The poems of Ozef Kalda that were set to music in Leos Janacek’s song cycle are now translated from the Czech into English by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney in Diary of One Who Vanished (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In Ben Sherwood's novel, Die Man Who Ate the 747 (Bantam), a lovesick Nebraskan devours a plane to prove his love. Photographers Francois and Jean Robert expose the secret expressions of objects, such as the smiles of shoes and the pouts of mops, in Faces (Chronicle). Josh Koppel's wee experimental photo-novel Good/Grief (Perennial) is an arresting “children’s book but for grown-ups.” Michael Thibodeau and Jana Martin's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (Abbeville) showcases more than a hundred years of clever cigarettepackaging design, which helped to disguise the fact that smoking kills you in the most appalling way. Evan Thomas investigates the life of perhaps the most compelling and mysterious of the Camelot clan in Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon & Schuster). In The Prince of Tennessee (Simon & Schuster), David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima imbue A1 Gore, the Democrats’ great wooden hope, with complexity, warmth, and promise—yes, really. Ah, jeez, forget the critics, for Chrissake, Margaret Salinger, you better pour yourself a martini and pray to Buddha that Dream Catcher (Pocket), your recollection of life with obsessively antisocial writer J.D., doesn’t knock you off dear Daddy’s Christmas-card list.