HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

FANFAIR

Gall in the Family

In Jennifer Gilmore's rich and entertaining novel Something Red (Scribner), the personal is political for a Jewish-American family living in Carter-era Washington, D.C. Communism may be capitulating, the era of protest consigned to the history books, but the lure of radicalisminfidelity, cults, anorexia, espionage—still rocks the Goldsteins’ domestic world.

Journalist Laurie Abraham commits herself to a year on the couch in The Husbands and Wives Club (Touchstone), observing five troubled couples as they struggle through the harrowing experience that is group marriage therapy. The discovery that his fifth wife is cheating on him pitches the august Nobel Prize-winning physicist of Ian McEwan'sSolar (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) into a spin—until he discovers a way to save the world, and perhaps his marriage, from a global disaster.

The Monster Mash

Musical mash-ups—as in Slayer meets Queen in DJ Schmolli’s artfully titled “Queen Will Slay You”—have been in vogue for years, but

remix-mania has now struck the literary establishment with a vengeance. Behold a monstrous new genre: the literary classic—most notably Jane Austen’s novels of mannersreconstructed as fantasy, horror, or gothic thriller.

Who or what is to blame for this hideous outbreak? Seth GrahameSmith's New York Times best-selling Pride and Prejudiee and Zombies

(soon to be a motion picture starring Natalie Portman) and Ben H. Winters'sSense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters? The madness and mayhem continue with GrahameSmith’s latest, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Grand Central), in which a David McCullough-style biographer recounts how Honest Abe, while waging the Civil War and freeing the slaves, was also battling the vampire scourge. If nothing else, these books inspire one to muse on titles of one’s own: Emma the Cannibal Queen or, perhaps. As I Lay Dying... from Werewolf Bites.