HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

One-two-three-four! Should I stay or should I go now? Photographer Bob Gruen rocks the Casbah with his snaps of The Clash (Vision On). Protean Renaissance mega-man Quincy Jones's autobiography, Q (Doubleday), tracks him from his child-prodigy days playing backup for Billie Holiday through producing Michael Jackson’s Thriller.Nelson George stands by Def Jam chairman Russell Simmons in Life and Def (Crown), the rags-to-Phat-Farm-jeans tale of the man who hatched the hip-hop revolution. Bjork, the simply ducky style compass for so many of us, flaunts her literary gifts and artwork in Bjork (Bloomsbury). The essays and art of “the Prophet of Punk,” Richard Hell, blow Hot and Cold (Powerhouse). In French snapshooter Dominique ToriesExile (Genesis), the South of France serves as the backdrop for the making of the Rolling Stones’ classic 70s album Exile on Main St. Dancing with Demons (St. Martin’s), by Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham, is the tragic saga of Dusty Springfield, Britain’s top pop-song diva. Patti LaBelle spouts a virtual fount of womanly wisdom in Pattis Pearls (Warner). In Bad Boy (Pocket Books), former rapper and award-winning author Ronin Ro takes singer, producer, and restaurateur Sean “P.Diddy” Combs across his knee for a host of atrocities, such as sinking Bad Boy Entertainment, glorifying drug dealers, and brazenly regurgitating 80s hits. Photographer Mark Seliger flies away with the tiber-goggled, killingly charismatic Lenny Kravitz (Arena). Editors Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Brown get to the source of our musical heritage in American Roots Music (Abrams). Wax master Nick Hornby spins his favorites from the past year in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2001.

Also this month: The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan (Bloomsbury) are studded with dazzling aesthetic meditations of a sexual, political, and theatrical bent from the revered critic and spectacular gossip. Jerry Stahl gets raw and devilishly raunchy in his new novel, Plainclothes Naked (Morrow). The wonderful Willard Carroll takes off the kid-dog collar, and the bitch tells all in I, Toto (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). Conscious and Verbal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) collects the gorgeously brawny poetry of Les Murray. From the inventor of Kitty Litter to the minister who gave Lee Harvey Oswald a Christian burial, the best obituaries from the legendary New York Times reporter Robert McG. Thomas shall forever rest in peace in 52 McGs (Scribner), edited by Chris Calhoun. David Owen meditates on the sheer otherworldliness of Tiger Woods in The Chosen One (Simon & Schuster). Letters to a Young Contrarian (Perseus) are rifled off by malcontented rabble-rouser and V.F. columnist Christopher Hitchens. Designer Paul Smith proclaims that you can find inspiration in anything and everything in Paul Smith (D.A.P.). Adam Lewis recalls Van Day Truex (Viking), the mythically charming tastemaker, from his stewardship of the Parsons School of Design to his reign at Tiffany’s. You can’t have just one: grab Peanuts (Pantheon), a compendium of more than 500 of American Zen cartoonist Charles M. Schulz's immortal comic strips. I write the type that makes the whole world sing.