HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

The present not scary enough for you? The fearless Margaret Atwood goes back to the future of The Handmaid's Tale in Oryx and Crake (Doubleday), but the world has been decimated by genetic engineering. The satirical stories in Matthew Derby'sSuper Flat Times (Back Bay) find the promises of technology welshed on. Also this month: Tom Robbins checks in with his eighth impossibly imaginative novel, Villa Incognito (Bantam). A fierce childhood friendship with the boy next door inflames Barbara Gowdy'sThe Romantic (Metropolitan). The desire for human connection runs throughout Alix Strauss's dark and spirited novel, The Joy of Funerals (St. Martin's). Architectural historian Christopher Gray'sNew York Streetscapes (Abrams) builds tales of Gotham's buildings and landmarks. Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, sends up 20 unstoppably Wacky Chicks (Simon & Schuster). Susan Fales-Hill's mother, Broadway actress Josephine Premice, taught her to be bold and to Always Wear Joy (HarperCollins). The late Caroline Knapp explores why women want in Appetites (Counterpoint). In Rough Amusements (Bloomsbury), novelist Ben Neihart conjures A'Lelia Walker, the Harlem Renaissance's Queen of the Night, and the underground gay world that worshiped her. Chip Brown'sGood Morning Midnight (Riverhead) plies the mystery that begins when a Capitol Hill speechwriter's life ends in suicide. For The Innocents (Umbrage), Taryn Simon compiles an unsettling portrait of justice subverted. Anne Applebaum dives into the Gulag (Doubleday), casting light on Soviet labor camps. Robert MacNeil goes Looking for My Country (Doubleday) and "finds himself in America." The definitive masterwork of modern Scandinavian architect Arne Jacobsen is preserved by Michael Sheridan in Room 606 (Phaidon). Edited by the celebrated George Plimpton, The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love ... (Picador) collects half a century's worth of the venerable magazine's most outstanding fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The upstart literary quarterly Tin House bursts into book publishing (and as a co-founder I couldn't be prouder) with A. J. Albany's excellent Low Down, a hipster's tale of growing up in old Hollywood with jazz pianist and junkie dad Joe Albany, and the fiction anthology Bestial Noise (Tin House/Bloomsbury). Patti Davis introduces Harry Benson's photo album Tire President & Mrs. Reagan (Abrams), but the love story needs no words at all. Roger Rosenblatt reports on his "inadequate life and yours" in Anything Can Happen (Harcourt). My Anecdotal Life (St. Martin's) finds Carl Reiner riffing on his past, in bits such as "Billy Wilder's Bratwurst." In her memoir, The Nearly Departed (Little, Brown), Brenda Cullerton describes her eccentric family—her mother gardening in only a bra and black satin panties, and her father stashing money in shoes. Joseph McElroy's eighth novel stars an Actress in the House (Overlook). Jimbo Matison'sSo Crazy Japanese Toys! (Chronicle) assembles an army of cataclysmically cool creatures. Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert collaborate in Wigfield (Hyperion), a ripping satire of a Lake Wobegon-style town on the brink of destruction, with photos by Todd Oldham. Vogue editrix Anna Wintour and New Yorker fashion editor Michael Roberts come out of the closet as mad about Manolo Blahnik Drawings (Thames & Hudson). Learn Hal Bowman's Traffic-Sign Haiku, Airport Check-in Limbo, and other Commuter waiting games (Quirk). And in Paulette Bogan's charming Goodnight Lulu (Bloomsbury) a baby chick frets about night-night. Hmm, I think shall take tWO. Who Can sleep, anyway?