Lt's love Arab-American-style! In Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent (Norton) love, lust, and Lebanese cooking commingle to create a deliciously romantic romp about l'amour and the quest for identity. Love and rockets light up the skies over Baghdad when two AWOL American Marines storm Baghdad to rescue a 16-year-old Kuwaiti princess in Tom Paine's The Pearl of Kuwait (Harcourt).

Also this month: In Robert Stone'sBay of Souls (Houghton Mifflin) an American professor finds himself sucked into a whirlpool of Third World corruption after he falls for a Caribbean woman who’s convinced that a voodoo spirit has stolen her soul. Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley's memoir, A.L.T. (Villard), is both a chilling account of life in “the chiffon trenches” and a warm homage to his muses, Diana Vreeland and his maternal grandmother. Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim scores A Life in Music (Arcade), from his days as a child prodigy to conducting Rubinstein and Casals. Norma Barzman's The Red and the Blacklist (Thunder’s Mouth Press) is the raunchy memoir of a Hollywood insider turned outsider by the McCarthy witch-hunts. In Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Susan Sontag re-investigates the power of imagery: are viewers incited to violence by the inhumanity we witness every day, or have we become inured? Arianna Huffington tells “how corporate greed and political corruption are undermining America” in Pigs at the Trough (Crown). It ain’t New York, or even London, but in Washington Schlepped Here (Crown Journeys) Christopher Buckley manages to make our nation’s capital seem endearing, even interesting. In gifted novelist Amanda Davis's wonderful high-wire act Wonder When You’ll Miss Me (William Morrow), a teenage gang-rape victim runs away to join the circus and finds herself. Robert Hough's The Final Confession of Mabel Stark (Atlantic Monthly Press) brings to life the greatest female tiger trainer in the history of the circus. Gerald Nachman's Seriously Funny (Pantheon) sends up the satirical revolution of the 1950s and 60s, which spawned rebel comedians such as Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Phyllis Diller. Follow Kathy Freston's seven steps to finding the right relationship, then brace yourself to Expect a Miracle (St. Martin’s Press). Renegade movie reviewer Joe Bob Briggs brings you an all-you-can-stomach shlockaganza of underground cult flicks in Profoundly Disturbing (Universe). Jack Kerouac is back in the Book of Haikus (Penguin). Photographer Elliott Erwitts Handbook, with a foreword by Charles Flowers, captures the mystery and majesty of the human paw (Quantuck Lane Press). Danny Gregory and Paul Sahre broadcast a life in ham radio in Hello World (Princeton Architectural Press). Pining for something wild and lovely? Pick David Stark and Avi Adler's Wild Flowers (Garkson Potter). “Glamour Boy” Steven Cojocaru unlocks his Red Carpet Diaries (Ballantine). Photojoumalist Jonathan Torgovnik gives himself over to the absolute-kitsch pleasures of Indian cinema in Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon). Dominique Issermann's luscious snappies for Victoria’s Secret are nuzzled together in Sexy (Victoria’s Secret). Joe LeSuer, Frank O’Hara’s live-in lover for the decade in which he wrote some of his most famous poems, brings forth Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Kiss his ring: Bill Tonelli has assembled writers from all the best families, such as Don DeLillo, Camille Paglia, and Nick Tosches, for The Italian American Reader (William Morrow).

Oh, make me an offer I can’t refuse ...