HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

n winter feels unending, drive yourself into the dizzying whiteout of Don DeLillo's seductive and mystifying tale The Body Artist (Scribner), in which a lonely young widow encoun ters a bewildering ageless stranger who seems to transcend the bounds of reality and consciousness. Also this month: Swimming pools, movie stars, toe socks ... Leslie Brenner's debut novel. Greetings from the Golden State (Henry Holt), finds a chronically perky California family on the brink of 70s-style immolation. The aftermath of a tragic summer weekend reverberates in Joanna Hershon's premiere. Swimming (Ballantine). In Alan Bennett's comic fable, The Clothes They Stood Up In (Random House), an English couple are forced to confront who they really are after their apartment is pillaged and then, voila, restored! Showcasing the father of Madonna’s conical bra, Colin McDowell'sJean-Paul Gaultier (Viking Studio) offers brilliant flashes of the outrageous and irreverent tastemaker’s oeuvre. Paul Lussier's Last Refuge of Scoundrels (Warner) is a wooden-teeth-and-all historical novel celebrating our Founding Fathers’ lust, greed, and self-aggrandizement oh, Ben, say it isn’t so! Karl Lagerfeld, the Fuhrer of Fashion, flaunts his “notion of form” in his new photography book, Aktstrakt (Steidl). In Amy Tan'sThe Bonesetter’s Daughter (Putnam), a Chinese mother recalls her girlhood in China, while her American daughter ghostwrites self-help books. “I just brought out the worst in them,” boasts the Rolling Stones' legendary Svengali-like manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, in his scandalous, conversational memoir, Stoned (St. Martin’s). In Happy Hours (Cliff Street/HarperCollins), Devon Jersild collects the barroom confessions and life stories of alcoholic women. Former Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler dedicated himself for two years to teaching English on the Yangtze; River Town (HarperCollins) offers an intimate, humorous, true-to-life portrait of modern China. For you Edward Hoagland nuts the wait is over—the master essayist and fiction and travel writer relives his struggles and joys in Compass Points (Pantheon). Suzanne Trocme'sRetro Home (Rizzoli) is a swell look at classic 20th-century interiors, with keen photos by Neil Mersh. Start spreading the news: two grand New York institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooke Astor, toast The City in art and literature with New York, New York (MMA Universe). Psychotherapist Adam Phillips's compulsively readable Promises, Promises (Basic Books) deconstructs the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, asking. Why lie on the couch when you can take to your bed with a book? Jamaica Kincaid's classic New Yorker pieces are collected in Talk Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In Committed to the Image (Merrell Publishers), edited by Barbara Head Millstein, contemporary black photographers provide intimate social commentary by turning their lenses on black artists, philosophers, writers, athletes, and politicians. Before you fling yourself willy-nilly into the wilderness of pitching woo, cool your jets with Prenups for Lovers (Villard), in which family-law expert Arlene G. Dubin counsels would-be paramours on how to pop the p-word. Go forth and romance ...