HOT TYPE

FANFAIR

From 1959 to 1974, William S. Burroughs, literature's most famous and longest-reigning king of the junkies, was at the pinnacle of his artistic powers, writing Naked Lunch and Nova Express, palling around with Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, and transforming himself into one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. During those years, he also wrote some astonishing letters, collected in Rub Out the Words (Ecco), edited by Bill Morgan.

Also this month, quel scandale! The title of Scotty Bowers'sFull Service (Grove) refers not to polishing rims or lube jobs (though they could be code) but rather to the secret sexual liaisons he claims to have arranged in the 40s and 50s for such Hollywood types as James Dean and, of course, J. Edgar Hoover.

Finally, That Woman (St. Martin's), also known as Wallis Simpson, gets her props from biographer Anne Sebba, who argues that, by enticing the pro-Nazi King of England to abdicate, the despised American divorcee actually saved England's arse from Fascist rule.

John D'Agata, author, creates a new form, with Jim Fingal, fact-checker, in The Lifespan of a Fact (Norton), an inter-textual reproduction of their seven-year-long relationship arguing over the boundaries between truth and accuracy in D'Agata's creative nonfiction essay. The filmmaker responsible for the seminal Holocaust documentary Shoah, French journalist Claude Lanzmann, documents his own extraordinary rise to power in The Patagonian Hare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) with Frank Wynne. In The Grey Album (Graywolf), poet-critic Kevin Young spins his essays and cultural criticism into a shadow history of how black music and literature, and the AfricanAmerican tradition of "jazzing" (or lying), have remixed American culture. The indomitable Marilyn ne Robinson radiates genius in her collection of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In her historical novel Enchantments (Random House), Kathryn Harrison fearlessly embraces darkness in the life of Rasputin's daughter. In Sonia Faleiro'sBeautiful Thing (Black Cat), the women of Bombay's underground dance bars get center stage. Comic novelist Adam Wilson makes his swaggering debut in Flatscreen (Harper Perennial). In Imagine (Houghton Mifflin), Jonah Lehrer, an expert in "the science of creativity," lays out what fires the imagination, including the way the color blue can spur you to double your creative output—clearly, my writing room could use a splash of azure.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL