FICTION

• AFTERIMAGE. By Helen Humphreys. (Metropolitan/Holt, $23.) A Canadian writer's lyrical, alluring novel, a kind of gloss on the life of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron; the character at its heart, however, is a passionately self-educated housemaid from starving Ireland who serves as a model and as the prize in a family tug of war.
• AIDING AND ABETTING. By Muriel Spark. (Doubleday, $21.) Spark at 82 can still manipulate characters so daringly their most improbable acts seem self-generated; in this instance, two men who claim to be the murderous Lord Lucan (missing since 1974) gang up to blackmail a Paris psychiatrist who is as unlikely as they are.
• BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS. By Anne Tyler. (Knopf, $25.) In her 15th novel, this chronicler of metaphysical discontent among the middle class recounts the wandering and return of the materfamilias of a spectacularly unhappy clan.
• THE BAY OF ANGELS. By Anita Brookner. (Random House, $23.95.) In her 20th novel, Brookner shifts her customary focus on an anomie-bedeviled heroine caught in the confusion between life and literature to ponder the freedom that accompanies the acceptance of limitations.
• THE BIOGRAPHER'S TALE. By A. S. Byatt. (Knopf, $24.) An exhilarating fable that divides the house of letters into theorists, scholars and practitioners; its hero, a small but ''perfectly formed'' scholar, is writing the life of a writer who wrote the life of a writer who wrote, or maybe intended to write or not, about Galton, Linnaeus and Ibsen.
• THE BODY ARTIST. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $22.) A tiny, intimate metaphysical ghost story by a master creator of huge, panoramic fiction; it concerns a woman alone in a large seaside house, where a strange man appears in an unused room. DeLillo's pinpoint prose copes with big themes, like the structure of time and the artist's approach to calamity.
• THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER. By Amy Tan. (Putnam, $25.95.) A novel of multiple narratives that puts to use the experiences, in very different countries and ages, of daughter, mother and grandmother to construct a family story and find the place in it for the youngest generation.
• BORDER CROSSING. By Pat Barker. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A characteristically angry novel on public themes, in which a charming 23-year-old psychopath comes back to overturn the life of the child psychologist who helped send him to jail 13 years earlier.
• CARRY ME ACROSS THE WATER. By Ethan Canin. (Random House, $23.95.) The water is almost certainly the Styx, as contemplated from some small remove by this novel's protagonist, a Pittsburgh beer baron whose protective arrogance is compromised by the eruption, unbidden, of 78 years' worth of memory.
• COLLECTED POEMS. By James Merrill. Edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. (Knopf, $40.) A big, handsome volume that displays Merrill's absorption and re-emission, transfigured, of every kind of experience this planet has to offer.
• COLLECTED STORIES. By Ellen Gilchrist. (Little, Brown, $27.95.) This thick sampling of Gilchrist's work over two decades gives plenty of scope for tracking her recurrent Southern heroines through her recurrent theme: that we are saved from regret and free-floating cynicism by the wonders of chance and love.
• THE COLLECTED STORIES OF RICHARD YATES. (Holt, $28.) Yates's focus on human weakness and self-deceit never made him all that popular in his lifetime (1926-92), so it's a joy tempered with apprehension to see this unflinching volume in which people trick themselves into seeking what they don't want.
• THE CONFESSIONS OF MYCROFT HOLMES: A Paper Chase. By Marcel Theroux. (Harcourt, $23.) The title is a tease about sibling rivalry; beyond it, there's a mystery involving a balance of forces somewhat like those in the author's real-life family, a burglary, a manuscript and an exercise of the novelist's imagination.
• CRAWLING AT NIGHT. By Nani Power. (Atlantic Monthly, $24.) In this first novel by a young writer with a strong hand for the grim-through-squalid, the central characters, a Japanese sushi chef in Manhattan and an alcoholic waitress, fall for each other and hit the road, intending reform but showing few of the necessary skills.
• THE DEATH OF VISHNU. By Manil Suri. (Norton, $24.95.) A deft, confident first novel that rarely departs from the landing of a Bombay apartment building, where a servant with the name of a god lies dying, while upstairs a nominal Muslim struggles with spiritual difficulties, seeking ''the rapture of faith.''
• DEMONOLOGY: Stories. By Rick Moody. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) Accomplished, fearless short stories that examine the exchange of energy between language and loss; inhabited mostly by young people whose heads are smarter than their hearts, and illuminated, sometimes, by barrages of emotional and rhetorical fireworks.
• DIRTY HAVANA TRILOGY. By Pedro Juan Gutierrez. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A ribald, earthy novel by a Cuban living in Cuba; the narrator, a former journalist who has fallen out with the Castro government, expertly evokes sensuous experience in his prose, and that experience is chiefly of poverty and sex, one of which helps him to survive the other.
• THE DYING ANIMAL. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $23.) The third Roth novel to star David Kepesh (title character of ''The Breast'' back in 1972) brings an old man's perspective to the characteristic needy, argumentative voice of Roth's heroes without cracking the solipsism and self-regard.
• ECLIPSE. By John Banville. (Knopf, $23.) In Banville's 12th novel, an actor, a man already heartlessly detached from his wife and daughter, loses all sense of being himself and hides out at his childhood home, alone with himself, the reader and a highly communicative narcissism.
• ELECTRIC LIGHT. By Seamus Heaney. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.) Heaney's new book of poems is a compendium of poetic genres set in an array of forms and tuned to many kinds of experience, the work of a mature poet and world citizen, aware of his cultural authority as a public man and of the rights and responsibilities that go with it.
• THE FAITHFUL NARRATIVE OF A PASTOR'S DISAPPEARANCE. By Benjamin Anastas. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Not really a narrative at all, for starters; a seductive, virtually plot-free examination of American culture, and particularly of a family of conspicuous consumers who are conscious of their sin but unable to stop committing it.
• FAITHLESS: Tales of Transgression. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.) Stories featuring themes like terror, female passion, male identity, loneliness, divorce, death and gun ownership, by an immensely productive author who wants us to be afraid of ourselves and shows us why.
• GABRIEL'S STORY. By David Anthony Durham. (Doubleday, $23.95.) Fifteen years old and black in the post-Civil-War West, the hero of this novel is as outside as an outsider can be; he has every qualification for the self-sufficiency that enables the classic confrontations of cowboy, Indian and nester.
• THE GARDENS OF KYOTO. By Kate Walbert. (Scribner, $24.) An elusive, eloquent first novel whose plot moves back and forth in America, Paris and Japan, as its narrator, a woman coming of age in the 1950's, construes the past in a way that obscures some uncomfortable facts but never involves her in emotional dishonesty.
• THE GLASS PALACE. By Amitav Ghosh. (Random House, $25.95.) A morally and psychologically complicated novel that examines the deceptions and self-deceptions of India's Anglicized elite, a tribe deliberately created by Britain to think and act Britishly, still going strong after 50 years of independence.
• GLUE. By Irvine Welsh. (Norton, paper, $14.95.) Imbued with the quality of oral epic by the argot of the Edinburgh pubs and projects, this novel follows the growth to middle-aged dissolution of four boyhood friends whose only limitless prospect is for self-destruction.
• GOATS. By Mark Jude Poirier. (Talk Miramax/Hyperion, $22.) When the hero of this first novel, a 14-year-old straight-A stoner from Tucson, goes east to a fancy prep school, he leaves behind not only his infantile New Age mother but also his surrogate father, a handyman who tends the flatulent bovid ruminants of the title.
• HONEYMOON: And Other Stories. By Kevin Canty. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.) Elliptical, impressionistic short stories, in a style at once tender and telegraphic, featuring characters who do the wrong things for the wrong reasons; for starters, in the first story Godzilla declares his love for Tokyo.
• HOTEL HONOLULU. By Paul Theroux. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) ''Fawlty Towers'' goes darkly Hawaiian in this comic novel, in which the author uses the grotesque denizens of the title hostelry to explore the exoticism of ordinariness -- or is it the other way around?
• THE HUNTER. By Julia Leigh. (Four Walls Eight Windows, $20.) A moody first novel that follows an obsessed Australian hunter in his effort, undertaken on a mission for a biotech company, to find and kill a Tasmanian tiger, a beast as fierce as the hunter himself but believed extinct since 1936.
• INSPIRED SLEEP. By Robert Cohen. (Scribner, $25.) An elegant, witty novel whose protagonist is a struggling, 39-year-old single mother and adjunct professor whose gravest need is just a little sleep; she gets it, eventually, through involvement with a not particularly scrupulous experimental sleep laboratory.
• IN SUNLIGHT, IN A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN. By Kathleen Cambor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A sober, indeed stoical, novel, incorporating class conflict and observing the personal and emotional reticence of the 19th century, set in Johnstown, Pa., in the year a flood morally attributable to rich people upstream killed more than 2,000 of the less rich.
• ISLAND: The Complete Stories. By Alistair MacLeod. (Norton, $25.95.) The small but highly concentrated output of 33 years' work, all of it dealing with life in Nova Scotia, where generations of hardship and authenticity are on the cusp of yielding to prosperity, education and cultural impoverishment.
• JOHN HENRY DAYS. By Colson Whitehead. (Doubleday, $24.95.) The tale of the steel-driving folk hero is set in counterpoint to that of a contemporary young black journalist, whose ironic detachment does little to conceal the brittleness of a life given over to cocktail-party circuitry; together, the twin narratives explore the emasculating burdens of manhood in America.
• THE JOURNEY HOME. By Olaf Olafsson. (Pantheon, $24.) This novel's heroine, a tough woman who has been running a hotel in England for 20 years, returns to her native Iceland, keeping a diary in which a lifetime's grave issues burble up; the author, vice chairman of Time Warner Digital Media, wrote the book in Icelandic, then Englished it himself.
• THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES AT LITTLE NO HORSE. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $26.) A beguiling novel that takes place in Ojibwa country in North Dakota and centers on the innocence of Father Damien Modeste, a wilderness priest who lives for a century and is really a woman.
• THE LECTURER'S TALE. By James Hynes. (Picador USA, $25.) A full-blown academico-Gothic farce, in which a self-effacing white male who loves books acquires the mysterious power to make people do whatever he wants; this faculty he employs against a Midwestern English department full of theorists and freaks.
• LIGHT ACTION IN THE CARIBBEAN: Stories. By Barry Lopez. (Knopf, $22.) A distinctive and often lovely sampling of Lopez's recent short fiction characterized by the author's belief that rewards come to the respectful explorer.
• LOVE, ETC. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $23.) Barnes's ninth novel continues the adventures of ''Talking It Over'' (1991), exhibiting the further ups and downs of two nearly young men and the woman they both love; like other Barnes folk, they have the habit of addressing the reader, sharing secrets other characters don't know.
• MARTYRS' CROSSING. By Amy Wilentz. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) This first novel by a former New Yorker correspondent in Israel seeks to explore the conflict there by pursuing the consequences of a fateful, unintended incident at a highway checkpoint and the lives of the Palestinian mother and the Israeli soldier involved.
• MILOSZ'S A B C'S. By Czeslaw Milosz. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Dozens of short, associatively shaped prose pieces, alphabetically arranged; they add up to a kind of memoir-essay on the 20th century by a distinguished poet who lived through almost all of it.
• MORE STORIES FROM MY FATHER'S COURT. By Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Autobiographical in spirit, these stories, first published in Yiddish in the 1950's, revivify the lost world of childhood as well as the culture of traditional Judaism and the stresses wrought on that culture by the early 20th century in Poland.
• MR. MEE. By Andrew Crumey. (Picador USA, $25.) A good-humored, intelligent, very up-to-date novel whose narrators, like physicists, shape reality by observing it; its title character, an awesomely naive English scholar, buys a computer on whose screen the darnedest things show up.
• MY DREAM OF YOU. By Nuala O'Faolain. (Riverhead, $25.95.) A big, generous, essentially old-fashioned novel in which a middle-aged, emotionally repressed travel writer returns to her native Ireland to confront not only her own history but that of her country.
• MY LITTLE BLUE DRESS. By Bruno Maddox. (Viking, $24.95.) A first novel in the form of a self-referential sendup of a memoir that seems to poke fun at just about everything but does so with a hearty good cheer.
• A NURSE'S STORY AND OTHERS. By Peter Baida. (University Press of Mississippi, $25.) A posthumous collection of short stories with characters who confront the ethical questions of everyday existence; the author's compassion lay in illuminating the issues, not in giving pat resolutions.
• PARADISE PARK. By Allegra Goodman. (Dial, $24.95.) Goodman's heroine and narrator, Sharon Spiegelman, spins from New Age fixes to variations on the old-time religions in a single-minded search for enlightenment and ecstasy; the fringes of possibility are expanded by setting the novel mostly in multicultural Hawaii, where the author grew up.
• THE PEPPERED MOTH. By Margaret Drabble. (Harcourt, $25.) The driven, thwarted and not hugely likable woman at the center of this memoirlike novel, which takes as its central conceit the biological concept of matrilineal descent, is modeled on Drabble's own mother.
• A PERFECT ARRANGEMENT. By Suzanne Berne. (Algonquin, $23.95.) A probing, intelligent venture into family life today, in which falsehoods multiply miraculously as a young professional couple of up-to-date styles and opinions yield their children to a nanny who knows how to see what she wants to see and tell people what they want to hear.
• PERFECT RECALL: New Stories. By Ann Beattie. (Scribner, $25.) Eleven sparkling stories from the prime student and expositor of the narcissistic, educated, white upper middle class on the East Coast and its complicated kinship structures.
• THE PERSIAN BRIDE. By James Buchan. (Houghton Mifflin, $23.) A novel both epic (it spans the last quarter-century in Iran) and romantic (love, in a specially ''selfless and fatal'' Persian version, drives the events), in which an innocent Englishman's year of marital bliss with an Iranian woman is followed by years of painful travail and searching.
• P.S. By Helen Schulman. (Bloomsbury, $23.95.) In this novel a lonely 38-year-old woman is reunited with a high school boyfriend who is dead and reincarnated, O.K.? Through this invention, Schulman makes room for a charming exploration of personal rediscovery.
• THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP. By John Wray. (Knopf, $24.) An extraordinary first novel, set in rural Austria in the 1930's; Wray, an American of Austrian descent, extracts from the Nazi-era eclipse of reason a kind of fictional meditation on the fate of the individual confronted by fascism.
• THE RISING SUN. By Douglas Galbraith. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) Galbraith's first novel, set in the late 17th century, offers a perfectly convincing version of what now seems one of history's nuttier schemes: the attempt by a Scottish expedition to colonize the isthmus of Darien (which we now call Panama).
• SCHMIDT DELIVERED. By Louis Begley. (Knopf, $25.) Begley's adroit novel of manners boldly renders Schmidt, his unlikable, rich, bigoted, defiant, aging protagonist (whom we have seen before in ''About Schmidt''), with the same humanizing fullness other authors save up for nice people.
• SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE OF PAUL CELAN. Translated by John Felstiner. (Norton, $29.95.) Felstiner, author of the biography ''Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew,'' has worked for more than two decades on these respectful translations, gathered from all periods of the poet's life.
• SINGING BOY. By Dennis McFarland. (Holt, $25.) The mystery that follows the murder at the beginning of this novel lies not in the crime but in the struggles of the victim's survivors -- wife, son and best friend -- to find ways to go on living, resolutions of heart and mind that will let them find words for themselves and for one another.
• SISTER INDIA. By Peggy Payne. (Riverhead, $24.95.) Estelle, the ferocious 400-pound protagonist of this unsettling novel, lives in what isolation she can find in teeming Varanasi, India, with an awful sin in her past that she tries to keep out of her mind; once it is released, a kind of deliverance -- but no easy out -- becomes possible.
• THREE APPLES FELL FROM HEAVEN. By Micheline Aharonian Marcom. (Riverhead, $23.95.) A vivid first novel depicts the Armenian genocide during World War I; one character, an American consul, wonders, as the reader is meant to do, why such cruelties are so little noted by the world.
• TO THE HERMITAGE. By Malcolm Bradbury. (Overlook, $27.95.) This posthumous novel addresses the question of posterity's treatment of writers; on an academic junket to St. Petersburg, a Bradburyish character proposes that authors never really die and their works continue, as a remarkable discovery in Russia confirms.
• TRANSFIGURATIONS: Collected Poems. By Jay Wright. (Louisiana State University, cloth, $59.95; paper, $24.95.) Virtually all the works of this brilliant, original poet whose verse is charged with both learning and reflection, considering both roots and voyages (born in New Mexico, Wright has lived in New England for 25 years now).
• TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG. By Peter Carey. (Knopf, $25.) An amazing act of historical impersonation in which the Victorian bandit Ned Kelly persuasively presents himself as a folk hero and Australian freedom fighter; by the author of ''Illywhacker'' and ''Oscar and Lucinda.''
• THE TWO HEARTS OF KWASI BOACHI. By Arthur Japin. (Knopf, $26.95.) A rich, spacious and humane first novel, set in the 19th century, by a Dutch writer whose protagonist, an Ashanti prince from the Gold Coast, is more or less taken hostage in the 1830's and compelled to live out his life in an exile that places no value on a black man.
• WHAT REMAINS. By Nicholas Delbanco. (Warner, $24.95.) A tender novel composed of the memories of a single family, Jewish escapees from Hitler's Germany to Britain and then America; with little plot or narrative, the book deploys interlinked lives the reader may enter into, and returns repeatedly to particular memories and accumulated family lore.
• THE WHITE MAN IN THE TREE: And Other Stories. By Mark Kurlansky. (Washington Square/Pocket Books, $23.95.) A sophisticated novella and some wicked, merry stories set in the Caribbean basin and concerning the misunderstandings, misjudgments and missed connections between people separated by race, culture or anything else; the author's first book of fiction (he's a newspaper person).
• WINTER JOURNEY. By Isabel Colegate. (Counterpoint, $23.) With a sneaky humor and a frank delight in her characters, the English novelist depicts a sexagenarian brother and sister who meet for a few days in the country.
• THE WOODEN SEA. By Jonathan Carroll. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $23.95.) This intellectually diverting novel by an American expatriate based in Vienna crosses from fantasy to science fiction to psychological thriller as it confronts its hero with a dead but teleporting dog, doubles of himself at various ages and other alarming phenomena.

MYSTERIES

• BAD NEWS. By Donald E. Westlake. (Mysterious/Warner, $23.95.) This priceless crime caper takes the disaster-prone burglar John Dortmunder to upstate New York, where he and his gang of goofs team up with some out-of-state con artists on a scheme to bamboozle two Indian tribes out of a piece of their gambling casinos.
• CANDYLAND: A Novel in Two Parts. By Evan Hunter and Ed McBain. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Half a study in twisted sexual neurosis, half a police procedural, this novel shows the dual skills of its two authors, who are one and the same writer.
• DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS. By P. D. James. (Knopf, $25.) Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh investigates the death of a young seminarian in an intricately plotted novel that ends not merely with restoration of the social order but with reconciliation to the power of faith.
• EXILE. By Denise Mina. (Carroll & Graf, $25.) The beaten-down women at a Glasgow shelter are used to taking abuse from the drunken men in their lives; but when one of the women ventures outside the shelter and is murdered, a young social worker is drawn deeper into the domestic war zone where the cycles of violence begin -- and never seem to end.
• MYSTIC RIVER. By Dennis Lehane. (Morrow, $25.) In this wrenching study of how a crime can bring down the entire neighborhood, a savage murder in a working-class section of Boston forces three former friends to return to an earlier crime and relive the exact moment when the world of their boyhood lost its innocence.
• ON NIGHT'S SHORE. By Randall Silvis. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95.) The busy, brawling, unwashed metropolis of New York in 1840 provides the vibrant backdrop for this historical mystery, in which a wild-eyed journalist who signs himself E. A. Poe teams up with a 10-year-old street urchin to investigate the sensational murder of a shopgirl, Mary Rogers.
• OVER TUMBLED GRAVES. By Jess Walter. (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, $25.) If every city gets the serial killer it deserves, Spokane, Wash., is stuck with a creep who preys on prostitutes who ply their trade along the river -- a lonely place that attracts the kind of people who have always lived on the edge of the water, condemned to dead-end lives.
• THE WHITECHAPEL CONSPIRACY. By Anne Perry. (Ballantine, $25.) Perry advances her ingenious political theories about Jack the Ripper's murderous rampage of 1888 in a historical mystery that finds conspiracy and corruption everywhere, from the queen's royalist supporters at court to antigovernment factions stirring up anarchy in the East End slums.

SCIENCE FICTION

• THE LAST HOT TIME. By John M. Ford. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $22.95.) In an America greatly changed by the re-emergence of magic, a young paramedic falls in with a Chicagoland gang of humans and elves headed by the enigmatic Mr. Patrise. Although the narrative takes the shape of myth, Ford keeps the focus on a love story as touching as it is surprising.
• PAVANE. By Keith Roberts. (Del Rey Impact, $12.95.) What better choice to launch a new series of quality reprints than this classic alternative-history novel, first published in 1968 and set in a 20th-century England that reverted to Roman Catholicism after the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I? Roberts evokes this imaginary time and place with a persuasive attention to detail and an irresistible narrative sweep.
• RETURN TO THE WHORL. By Gene Wolfe. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $25.95.) A weighty addition to Wolfe's far-future epic about faith and its consequences. To understand it, readers should be acquainted with at least some of the earlier volumes in his Long Sun series. As fine a writer as science fiction has produced, Wolfe demands a lot from his readers, but here, as always, it's worth meeting him more than halfway.
• SHIP OF FOOLS. By Richard Paul Russo. (Ace, paper, $12.95.) A heady blend of religious allegory and first-contact puzzle story. Having lost sight of their original mission, the inhabitants of a self-sufficient starship break into bitterly opposed factions. An encounter with an alien vessel forces everyone to confront the age-old question of how evil can exist in a divinely ordered universe.
• VENTUS. By Karl Schroeder. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $27.95.) Nothing is what it seems on Ventus, a planet transformed into an Earth-like ''paradise'' by nanotechnology. On a world where everything is, in some sense, alive, why are humans barely tolerated? While more-than-human powers contend for control of Ventus, a handful of humans, often working at cross-purposes, try to avert a tragedy of cosmic proportions.
• WILD SEED. By Octavia E. Butler. (Warner/Aspect, paper, $13.95.) First published in 1980, this mesmerizing tale combines traditions of African and African-American storytelling with a keen understanding of biological and evolutionary imperatives.

NONFICTION

• THE ADVERSARY: A True Story of Monstrous Deception. By Emmanuel Carr�re. (Metropolitan/Holt, $22.) Jean-Claude Romand was a pathological impostor, a liar about facts large and small. It was only a matter of time before his family smelled a rat. But he found a way to deal with that problem too.
• AMERICAN CHICA: Two Worlds, One Childhood. By Marie Arana. (Dial, $23.95.) The child of a Peruvian father and an American mother, the author regards her girlhood from a vantage point at once intimately domestic and sweepingly allegorical, concluding finally that she has no need, and no desire, to reconcile the vastly separated longitudinal end points that define her family.
• AN AMERICAN FAMILY: The Kennans. The First Three Generations. By George F. Kennan. (Norton, $22.95.) The diplomatic historian tells the story of the first three generations of his family in North America.
• THE APE AND THE SUSHI MASTER: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist. By Frans de Waal. (Basic, $26.) An engaging history of primate studies, written by one of the world's most distinguished primatologists, that argues that culture owes more to the lower orders than humans comfortably believe.
• BEFORE THE STORM: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. By Rick Perlstein. (Hill & Wang, $30.) Combining prodigious research with journalistic flair, an independent scholar traces the origins of today's conservative movement to the candidate who was overwhelmingly defeated for president in 1964.
• BING CROSBY. A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903-1940. By Gary Giddins. (Little, Brown, $30.) Written by an eminent jazz critic, a biography that scrupulously tracks the life and art of a very fine and immensely successful jazz singer and recording artist (and indifferent movie star).
• BODY OF SECRETS: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century. By James Bamford. (Doubleday, $29.95.) Bamford's second book on the National Security Agency is the most authoritative recent account of the world of electronic spying.
• BOOK BUSINESS: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. By Jason Epstein. (Norton, $21.95.) Essays (once a lecture series at the New York Public Library) on the lit biz by the founder of Anchor Books and a lot of other valuable things; his constant theme, which his own career belies, is that publishing was at its best in the 1920's and has run downhill ever since.
• CARRY ME HOME. Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. By Diane McWhorter. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) A heroic, exhaustive journey, both documentary and personal, through the struggle, especially the violent summer of 1963; by a daughter of the city's white elite.
• CHESTER HIMES: A Life. By James Sallis. (Walker, $28.) A smart, conscientious biography of the black novelist (1909-84) whose invention of the detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, operating in a hyperdetailed, disorienting Harlem, yielded his most incisive, radical and enduring fiction.
• COMFORT ME WITH APPLES: More Adventures at the Table. By Ruth Reichl. (Random House, $24.95.) This second volume of memoir by The Times's former restaurant critic invokes themes larger than mere food: commune life in Berkeley, the social texture of dining out, the longing for a child.
• CONSTANTINE'S SWORD. The Church and the Jews: A History. By James Carroll. (Houghton Mifflin, $28.) Partly a Roman Catholic's memoir of a gradually arising moral reckoning in the 20th century, partly an examination of the relations between Christians and Jews, a central issue posed immediately in the first century and very often lamentably mishandled since then.
• THE CREATION OF THE MODERN WORLD: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. By Roy Porter. (Norton, $35.) An English historian's spirited account of the contributions England made to the Enlightenment.
• CRIMEA: The Great Crimean War, 1854-1856. By Trevor Royle. (St. Martin's, $35.) A well-written, thorough study of what can be considered the first modern war.
• DAZZLER: The Life and Times of Moss Hart. By Steven Bach. (Knopf, $29.95.) A careful, cleareyed account of the life of the playwright, director and actor (1904-61) who collaborated with Broadway's best and pleased many people many times without making large claims for his own significance.
• DISPLACED PERSONS: Growing Up American After the Holocaust. By Joseph Berger. (Scribner, $26.) A memoir that examines the author's competing desires to cast off and to embrace his family's refugee legacy; Berger, an editor at The Times, arrived in this country at the age of 5 with his parents, who had spent World War II one step ahead of the Nazis.
• DOUBLE FOLD: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. By Nicholson Baker. (Random House, $25.95.) A jeremiad, a philippic, an imprecation against library professionals and all their friends who are bent on discarding books and newspapers made of genuine righteous paper while recording their contents on vile, accursed microfilm.
• THE DREAM OF REASON: A History of Western Philosophy From the Greeks to the Renaissance. By Anthony Gottlieb. (Norton, $27.95.) A fluent, lucid account of about 2,000 years of trying to think as straight as possible, by an editor of The Economist; technical terms, when they have to be used, are clearly explained.
• EASTWARD TO TARTARY: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. By Robert D. Kaplan. (Random House, $26.95.) A prolific travel writer and journalist interprets the regions from Bulgaria to Baku as sites for noisy, troublesome engines of change.
• THE ELEMENT OF LAVISHNESS: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938-1978. Edited by Michael Steinman. (Counterpoint, $27.50.) She the author of more than 150 short stories in The New Yorker; he her editor; both of them articulate to a degree normal people need not bother even to aspire to. A feast.
• THE ETERNAL FRONTIER: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples. By Tim Flannery. (Atlantic Monthly, $27.50.) The last 65 million years, seen through a synthesis of scientific, cultural and historical studies in a perpetual sequence of invasion, adaptation and extinction, with fresh opportunity for each succeeding species.
• FACING THE WIND: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation. By Julie Salamon. (Random House, $24.95.) A breathtaking account of a man who killed his wife and children and was found insane, but soon released from custody -- and of what happened after that, by a television critic for The Times.
• FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMERICA: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976. By Hunter S. Thompson. Edited by Douglas Brinkley. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) The second volume of a projected trilogy collecting the correspondence of the monstre sacr� of American journalism.
• THE FL�NEUR: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. By Edmund White. (Bloomsbury, $16.95.) White, who lived there for 16 years, takes the reader on a wander through the cultures and subcultures, some of them barely perceptible to outsiders, of a city where conservatism and anarchy have long gone hand in hand.
• FOUNDING BROTHERS: The Revolutionary Generation. By Joseph J. Ellis. (Knopf, $26.) A scholar's portrayal of the fraternity that founded our nation -- Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison and Burr -- and managed, usually, to solve controversies by personal honor and exertion before settled political structures fell into place.
• GOING UP THE RIVER: Travels in a Prison Nation. By Joseph T. Hallinan. (Random House, $24.95.) A reporter for The Wall Street Journal, after four years of visiting prisons, reports that they have become public works projects, with brutalities to prisoners the price.
• GRANT. By Jean Edward Smith. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) The author, a political scientist, takes issue with the conventional view that Grant's presidency was a national embarrassment, a judgment he attributes to the work of snobs like Henry Adams and of scholars who favored white supremacy.
• GREENSPAN: The Man Behind the Money. By Justin Martin. (Perseus, $28.) The author, a former staff writer at Fortune, has written a biography that shows how Alan Greenspan's early experiences have shaped his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
• HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Life of a Storyteller. By Jackie Wullschlager. (Knopf, $30.) We would not have liked him personally; hardly anyone did, but Wullschlager shows this histrionic, effeminate, uneducated gawk working the most painful emotions into great literature in his deathless fairy tales.
• HITLER. 1936-45: Nemesis. By Ian Kershaw. (Norton, $35.) The second and final volume of Kershaw's biography sees in its subject an unerring sense of other people's weaknesses, their fears and vanities, greed and blood lust, the mental equipment of a malign guru whose followers could (and did) project their worst fantasies onto him.
• HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy. Edited by Amanda Smith. (Viking, $39.95.) A whopping compilation (738 pages) by one of Kennedy's granddaughters, it shows a man of outsize sentiment and sometimes resentment, active of mind and demanding activity of others.
• HOW I CAME INTO MY INHERITANCE: And Other True Stories. By Dorothy Gallagher. (Random House, $22.95.) A comic, moving, sometimes disturbing book of essays about the author's Ukrainian Jewish heritage; parts of it are far from nice but engagingly brave.
• IN FACT: Essays on Writers and Writing. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $26.95.) A bracing collection by a writer who kicked over academic life in 1991 for the free world, where he became fiction editor of Gentlemen's Quarterly and an essayist whose tongue is sharp, whose allegiance is to the past and whose correctness isn't political.
• IN THE BEGINNING: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture. By Alister McGrath. (Doubleday, $24.95.) In an engagingly breezy tone, the author documents the dominant effect that the Bible in English has had on the language.
• ISLAM'S BLACK SLAVES: The Other Black Diaspora. By Ronald Segal. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A carefully documented history of slavery in the Muslim world, a subject little studied in contrast to the Atlantic slave trade.
• JOHN ADAMS. By David McCullough. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) McCullough's Adams reminds the reader of Harry S. Truman, who likewise said exactly what he thought when he thought it; in the inevitable comparisons with Jefferson, this Adams's stock is rising.
• KILLING DRAGONS: The Conquest of the Alps. By Fergus Fleming. (Atlantic Monthly, $26.) A history of exploration of the Alps, told with droll, detached amusement.
• LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance. By Anthony Grafton. (Hill & Wang, $35.) A masterly biography of the representative figure of the Renaissance.
• A LIFE OF JAMES BOSWELL. By Peter Martin. (Yale University Press, $35.) A vivid, sensitively observed narrative of the life of Samuel Johnson's biographer.
• LILLIAN GISH: Her Legend, Her Life. By Charles Affron. (Lisa Drew/ Scribner, $35.) A biography of the great silent screen star who refused to go under just because she was out of date, still working when she was 94; the author detects in her life a conscious shaping of her legend, particularly a sort of cover-up for the kinks of her great mentor, D. W. Griffith.
• THE LOST CHILDREN OF WILDER: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care. By Nina Bernstein. (Pantheon, $27.50.) A deeply researched, thoughtful account, by a reporter for The Times, of an attempt to reform a New York City system that seemed to discriminate unconstitutionally.
• MAESTRO: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom. By Bob Woodward. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) A lucid insightful examination of the tenure of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
• MAUVE: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World. By Simon Garfield. (Norton, $23.95.) An engaging and airy history of the first mass-produced artificial dye and how it ignited a 19th-century revolution in applied science.
• THE MONEY AND THE POWER: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000. By Sally Denton and Roger Morris. (Knopf, $26.95.) Las Vegas arraigned for drug trafficking, money laundering and politician corrupting, with quite a lot of evidence but little sense of why people have fun there.
• MORAL FREEDOM: The Impossible Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now. By Alan Wolfe. (Norton, $24.95.) Approaching his subjects with empathy and respect, a sociologist surveys a broad cross-section of Americans on their ethical beliefs and finds that we set high standards of conduct but tend to eschew moral mandates.
• NICKEL AND DIMED: On (Not) Getting By in America. By Barbara Ehrenreich. (Metropolitan/Holt, $23.) The author joined the ranks of the working poor, taking jobs as a waitress, a scrubwoman and a ''Wal-Martian'' to test the vaunted ideal of work as a ticket out of poverty; the ticket, she discovered, turns out to be for an unplanned round trip.
• ON HER OWN GROUND: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. By A'Lelia Bundles. (Lisa Drew/Scribner, $30.) A biography that is also a social history of its subject's times (1867-1919); born to poverty, Walker made a fortune with a product that straightened hair and became a bold philanthropist and advocate of women's independence as well as an exemplar of black enterprise.
• ON THE WING: A Young American Abroad. By Nora Sayre. (Counterpoint, $25.) The journalist and critic recalls her days in London in the 1950's with the likes of Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler and Tyrone Power.
• THE PRICE OF MOTHERHOOD: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued. By Ann Crittenden. (Metropolitan/Holt, $25.) An economic journalist argues that the enormous costs of motherhood raise issues of social policy that have not been addressed by American society.
• RACE AND REUNION: The Civil War in American Memory. By David W. Blight. (Harvard University, $29.95.) A historian recounts how the meaning of the Civil War was debated and constructed between Appomattox and ''The Birth of a Nation.''
• REFLECTIONS ON EXILE: And Other Essays. By Edward W. Said. (Harvard University, $35.) Written between 1967 and the present by a literary critic and advocate for the Palestinian cause, these pieces often deal with the self-deceiving fictions of the colonizers about the people they oppress; others deplore some fashionable critical theories as unengaged with real life and history.
• REMEMBER ME TO HARLEM: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. Edited by Emily Bernard. (Knopf, $30.) The record of an ironic, ribald, frequently poignant interracial friendship between a poet who interpreted the black experience and a novelist who did his best to promote Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.
• RIVER TOWN: Two Years on the Yangtze. By Peter Hessler. (HarperCollins, $26.) A finely drawn memoir whose author taught English in the city of Fuling, China, soon to be deluged by the completion of a nearby dam; the strangeness of the Chinese to him, and his to them, are offered in the best tradition of the old-fashioned travel book.
• ROMANCING: The Life and Work of Henry Green. By Jeremy Treglown. (Random House, $26.95.) A generous, acute and above all not too long biography of the rich, publicity-shy, pseudonymous English novelist whose work (''Living,'' ''Loving,'' ''Party Going'') was deservedly well known 50 years ago.
• ROMANCING THE FOLK: Public Memory & American Folk Music. By Benjamin Filene. (University of North Carolina, cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.) A fascinating history of the shifting notions of what constitutes American folk music.
• SAFE AREA GORAZDE. By Joe Sacco. (Fantagraphics Books, $28.95.) Using a comic-book format, the author, a cartoonist, has created a work that combines a rare insight into the human experience of the war in Bosnia with a nuanced political and historical understanding of the conflict.
• THE SANTA FE TRAIL: Its History, Legends, and Lore. By David Dary. (Knopf, $30.) The absorbing story of the 900-mile trade route to the Southwest, told by the veteran historian of the West.
• SEABISCUIT: An American Legend. By Laura Hillenbrand. (Random House, $24.95.) A racing journalist's charming biography of the homely, slow-developing, greathearted horse whose heroic career as a pretelevision celebrity culminated in the 1938 match race with the Triple Crown winner War Admiral.
• THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. By Daniel L. Schacter. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) A Harvard psychologist details the science behind the different forms of memory and forgetting.
• THE SHADOW OF THE SUN. By Ryszard Kapuscinski. (Knopf, $25.) A collection of 29 pieces representing 40 years of reporting from Africa by Poland's most famous foreign correspondent, whose reports on tyrannies abroad (Angola, Ethiopia, Iran) gave Poland's Communist rulers the fantods.
• SIDETRACKS: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer. By Richard Holmes. (Pantheon, $30.) Essays by the least earthbound of biographers on subjects like the literary productivity of Romney Marsh and the youthful despair from which the author was rescued by the yet more despairing Chatterton.
• STET: A Memoir. By Diana Athill. (Grove, $24.) The doyenne of English book editors recalls her years at Andre Deutsch, whose authors included V. S. Naipaul, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, Jean Rhys and Molly Keane, and how changing economic (and cultural) conditions doomed quality book publishing.
• THE THIRD REICH: A New History. By Michael Burleigh. (Hill & Wang, $40.) An interpretation of Nazism that sees it as both a totalitarian system and a political religion.
• TIP O'NEILL: And the Democratic Century. By John Aloysius Farrell. (Little, Brown, $29.95.) The life and career of the Massachusetts Democrat who never lost faith in the proposition that government could cure what ailed society, and engineered a successful resistance to President Ronald Reagan's effort to sink the New Deal.
• TREASON BY THE BOOK. By Jonathan D. Spence. (Viking, $24.95.) A lively narrative examination of a thought-control episode in 18th-century China, where the emperor and his philosopher-bureaucrats (much like their successors today) sought to eliminate every vestige of incorrect thinking, by fiat if possible and by death if not.
• ULTIMATE JOURNEY: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment. By Richard Bernstein. (Knopf, $26.) The author, a book critic for The Times, did much the same things in the same places; it was not easy, but it brought unexpected rewards.
• AN UNEXPECTED LIGHT: Travels in Afghanistan. By Jason Elliot. (Picador USA, $30.) The author explores past and present, at considerable personal risk, in the Afghan resistance to Russia and in the collapse that preceded the Taliban rule of the present.
• WASHINGTON. By Meg Greenfield. (PublicAffairs, $26.) The veteran journalist, who died in 1999, gives a dour, unblinkered look at the nation's capital.
• WAS THIS MAN A GENIUS? Talks With Andy Kaufman. By Julie Hecht. (Random House, $23.95.) Hecht, a writer of short stories inveigled into a nonfiction assignment, spent a year interviewing the strange cult comedian of the late 1970's, or trying to. The product shows an annoying but sympathetic character, as so many of his fans suspected already.
• WIDE AS THE WATERS: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. By Benson Bobrick. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) An ambitious and largely successful attempt to demonstrate that the English translations of the Bible provided the spiritual resource for the creation of popular government.