HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

Look up, darling! Does that skyscraper thrill you or chill you? Does that Gothic ceiling elevate your soul or make you blue? explains why in his soaring deconstruction of The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon).

Casting into history for inspiration: Back before downtown New York was mutated by a plague of university housing and chain stores, there was a thriving literary scene, as recalls in his nostalgic Up Is Up, but So Is Down (NYU Press). In Pretty Things (Regan), stripteasers bump and grind into the often dark reality of modern burlesque queens. Francois I trumpets the era of 1965-75, when our culture was informed by a truly underground and alternative Free Press (Rizzoli/Universe).

ALSO THIS MONTH: tells how the fiction-loving Bush administration spun The Greatest Story Ever Sold (Penguin). compiles the letters of indomitable activist Jessica Mitford, affectionately known as Decca (Knopf). Screamingly funny says, / Like You (Warner), with her own brand of "hospitality under the influence." In Setting the Table (HarperCollins), restaurateur nonpareil, shares his never-fail recipe for business success. A fourthgrade teacher hacks up her allegedly abusive husband in Joyce Maynard's true-crime thriller, Internal Combustion (Wiley). Despite her diagnosis, Marisa Acocella Marchetto was no victim—call her a Cancer Vixen (Knopf). In hypnotic novel The Uses of Enchantment (Doubleday), the true or imagined abduction of a teenage girl casts a spell on all those around her. Jacques Helleu & Chanel (Abrams) distills the essence of the stylistic overlord's iconic vision. Elizabeth Edwards, wife of V.P. hopeful John Edwards and breast-cancer survivor, attributes a large part of her recovery to Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers (Broadway).

IN SHORT ORDER: raises Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome (Simon & Schuster); Dunhill by Design (Flammarion); Things I Didn't Know (Knopf), from critic Robert Hughes; Melissa Painter and David Weisman claim their 15 minutes of fame with Edie: Girl on Fire (Chronicle); Alfred Wertheimer's Elvis at 21 (Insight Editions);

Christophe von Hohenberg shoots Andy Warhol: The Day the Factory Died (Empire Editions); Restless (Bloomsbury); A Year in Sports (Abbeville); The Stories of Mary Gordon (Pantheon); adores Picasso: Life with Dora Maar (Flammarion); Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Knopf); The War of the World (Penguin Press); rises with Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf); The Blind Side (Norton).

Finally, the collision of Hunter S. Thompson and illustrator ignited the fireball of gonzo journalism. Steadman's The Joke's Over (Harcourt) recalls a friendship that spanned from the civil-rights movement to Watergate and beyond. As Thompson famously said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."