HOT TYPE ELISSA ACHAPPELL

not on the president's fall reading list: A liberal media bias? Bush is a compassionate conservative? Ha! Those are just two of the Big Lies (Thomas Dunne) Joe Conason exposes in his terrifically smart attack on the right-wing propaganda machine. Kenneth Cole's Footnotes (Simon & Schuster) showcases his years of cleverly using celebrity-designer status as a soapbox for liberal causes, and advertisements as an engine for social change. Your reading list: Prepare to be held hostage by Susan Choi's mesmerizing American Woman (HarperCollins), in which three young radicals hide out with a Japanese-American 60s activist. From the days of horse-drawn carriages to the destruction of the Twin Towers, Ric Burns, James Sanders, and Lisa Ades erect an illustrated history of New York (Knopf). Gail Sheehy amasses woeful 9/11 tales of loss from horror-struck parents, grieving children, and young widows nursing babies in Middletown, America (Random House). In Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Melville House), Bernard-Henri Levy posits that Pearl wasn't murdered simply because he was a reporter, but because he was onto a bigger story, and points a finger at the alleged real killer. New York City public defender Robert Heilbrun attempts to walk the walk of those other lawyers turned scriveners Grisham and Lehane in his debut novel, Offer of Proof(Morrow). A virus based on research started in Nazi labs becomes a weapon of mass destruction in Stan Pottinger's thriller The Last Nazi (St. Martin's). Man on a mission Mark Fuhrman continues his quest in Death and Justice (Morrow). In Not Much Just Chillin' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), courageous Washington Post journalist Linda Perlstein travels deep into the heart of darkness—middle school—to report back on the secret lives of adolescents. In-girl Jennifer McKnight-Trontz passes notes on How to Be Popular (Chronicle). Jhumpa Lahiri expands her Pulitzer Prize-winning short stories of Indian assimilation into her lovely first novel, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin). In Fernanda Eberstadt's novel The Furies (Knopf), an upper-class woman and a struggling Jewish puppeteer find their happiness savaged by their past. Tune in, all you desolation angels and dharma bums, and turn on to Paul Maher's jazzy bio of Kerouac (Rowan and Littlefield). Kevin McDermott throws open the doors of Edward Gorey's Elephant House (Pomegranate), offering a man-as-his-castle portrait of the enigmatic genius. Lock yourself up in The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday), Jonathan Lethem's most ambitious and sprawling novel to date. Grief suffuses the short stories in Julie Orringer's debut. How to Breathe Under Water (Knopf). Katy Lederer hits the jackpot with Poker Face (Crown), her memoir of growing up in a rambling gambling family. An anthropologist unearths an extinct people in Adam Johnson's sly visionary novel, Parasites Like Us (Viking). Pat Schneider describes the exquisite torture of Writing Alone and with Others (Oxford). Hook up the Fry Daddy and let's fix to mix it up with Arrol Gellner's Ready to Roll (Viking), a toast to the classic American mobile home. Hold on as Steven Heller takes us from Merz to Emigre and Beyond (Phaidon). The Naked Chef—fully turned out—guides even the most hard-core culinary bumbler to gustatory brilliance in Jamie's Kitchen (Hyperion). One of the most enduring and remarkable novels of childhood, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way (Viking), is transformed into something even more enchanting in Lydia Davis's new translation. Possibly on the president's fall reading list: Art is good, but why travel to museums in faraway places when you can bring your own pillow to Laurent de Brunhoff's Babar's Museum of Art (Abrams)? A perky, pachyderm-friendly, completely Piss Christ-free history of art. Repeat after me: Art is good. War is bad.

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