Bookworm

Good Faith (Knopf) An ebullient book about fraud and deception-the eighties, Jane Smiley-style.

Cosmopolis (Scribner's) and The Body Artist (Scribner's) In this, the second of a two-part interview, Don DeLillo explores his most enigmatic creation: the weird gnome at the heart of his last novel, The Body Artist.

The deadpan master of post-modern dysfunction-comedy takes an ordinary New York traffic jam and transforms it into a funeral procession that guides his protagonist to defeat and death. 

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies (Harper Collins) A young doctor who has worked in developing countries, John Murray has written a collection of stories in which chaos and order wrestle for domination...

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin-s) Kate Moses attempts and achieves the impossible: she weaves Sylvia Plath-s imagery and intensity into an interior landscape illuminating the last week of the great poet-s life. In the process, Moses creates a convincing portrait of a hypothetical Plath-one who has earned a mastery of her demons and a place in the Pantheon.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead) With her extraordinarily confident language, newcomer ZZ Packer confronts issues of race, class and education that have flummoxed more-experienced writers...

The Hazards of Good Breeding (Norton) Jessica Shattuck skewers the narrow-minded prejudices of the Boston aristocracy. How did Shattuck, the daughter of a liberal lawyer and niece of a prominent literary critic, find the tenderness and insight necessary to give her characters human depth?

This remarkable anthology presents a picture of what the American essay is, and what, with any luck, it may become.   

Pattern Recognition (Putnam) William Gibson, the inventor of cyber-punk, says that his new novel, though set in the future, is realistic...

The Spooky Art (Random House) Norman Mailer, the lion at eighty, stayed lair-bound long enough to assemble this collection of his thoughts about writing..