HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

He is risen! This Is Spinal Tap star Tony Hendra continues to tap the spiritual in his novel. The Messiah of Morris Avenue (Henry Holt), imagining the Second Coming as a radical young man who defies the idea that God is either a Bible-thumping Republican or a tree-hugging Democrat.

All the red, white, and blues of Remarriage American-Style are represented in Anne Burt's essay anthology. My Father Married Your Mother (Norton). In Quite Honestly (Viking), John Mortimer ditches his precious Rumpole for a scrappy do-gooder gal eager to convert an ex-con. Fifty years after its publication, Allen Ginsberg's Howl still echoes: witness The Poem That Changed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), editor Jason Shinder's chorus of essays by hipsters such as Robert Pinslcy, Frank Bidart, and Amiri Baraka. Master satirist and caricaturist Edward Sorel's Literary Lives (Bloomsbury U.S.A.) makes hay out of such moments as when Jung buddied up to Nazis and Beauvoir provided Sartre with nubiles for his erotic enjoyment. Nothing to Wear? (Hudson Street)—Joe Lupoand Jesse Garza solve the most vexing sartorial problems. Desperate to land a diamond—with a man attached? Jessica Kaminsky shares The Truth Behind the

Rock (Simon Spotlight).

In My Lives (Ecco), Edmund White gets gossipy about his shrinks, lovers, and AIDS. Mark Danner plots the Bush administration's Secret Way to Iff(New York Review Books). Deep Throat and his lawyer—or Mark Felt and John O'Connor tell all in A G-Man's Life (Public Affairs). Making their springtime fiction debuts: Tony D'Souza, whose Whiteman (Harcourt) is a relief worker who refuses to leave his post in the African bush; foreign correspondent Neil MacFarquhar, who captures the ferocious absurdity of the Gulf War in The Sand Cafe (Public Affairs); and Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, who gets giggly over How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life (Little, Brown).

The hero of Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt (Doubleday) is a nomenclature consultant whose towering triumph is naming a multi-culti Band-Aid. A widower gives chase to the whale that devoured his wife, child, and arm in Keith Thomson's Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal (MacAdam/Cage). Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh revel in Exploitation Poster Art (Aurum). Phaidon Press makes Andy Warhol 'Giant" Size. A girl on the verge searches for her father in Yannick Murphy's shockingly funny Here They Come (McSweeney's). The P.O.V. of a 13-year-old in Thatcher's England powers the audacious David Mitchell's Black Swan Green (Random House). Ken Foster had no idea when he began taking in strays that he'd be the one finding salvation in The Dogs Who Found Me (Lyons). Gimme shelter.