THE CULTURAL COLD WAR: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. A pair of privileged young Americans take on a hopeless caper, intending to outsmart some Cambodian drug lords; the author, dead last year at 33 of what looked like a heroin overdose, had a satirical talent that will be missed. A smart, absorbing story collection (the author's first) in which young men discover that the world is an impossible place, at least right now: ''Sex is never normal with anyone, '' as one of them puts it.
An admiring if unadoring biography seeks to reclaim its subject from drunken-clown caricature, arguing that Yeltsin was just what Russia needed at a crucial historical pass. A lively, haunting novel that explores American male friendship as it pursues in parallel the last days and death of Bellow's friend Allan Bloom, author of ''The Closing of the American Mind. All the poems that appeared in English while Brodsky (1940-96), Nobel laureate, scourge of liberal pieties and embattled proponent of a formal poetics, was still alive to supervise their appearance. Cell authority maybe crossword. A highly circumstantial report on Asia that expects a glorious future for the continent as the world power center; by two staff members of The New York Times who did duty as Times correspondents in Asia. STORK CLUB: America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Cafe Society. By Daniel Mark Epstein. )
A thoughtful biography of one of the archracists and pillars of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South. A mine of information about the 19th-century struggle of Britain and Russia to control the neighborhood. By James Alan McPherson. Cell authority maybe nyt crosswords. ) DIAMOND DUST: Stories. The life's work of the new poet laureate of the United States, now 95; much of it thematically and structurally interconnected, bold and generous in its statements about birth, death, the cosmos.
PERSIAN MIRRORS: The Elusive Face of Iran. This restless, sprawling first novel, the story of two brothers married to two sisters, is ultimately a survey of the varieties of African-American. Written and illustrated by David Macaulay. Liberalism, under one or another definition, is the force that shaped and eventually failed the author's grandfather (a congressman from Alabama), his father (a legal scholar and student of procedure) and himself (once a Peace Corps volunteer, now a writer, and though bloodied not yet totally bowed). By Maurice Isserman. Beautiful illustrations are even more powerful than the free-verse text. Meditations by a London psychotherapist on Darwin's lifelong study of earthworms and Freud's exemplary command of death and its uses, finding in each a cause for celebration in a world abandoned by God. ONCE UPON A TIME IN NEW YORK: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age. LOVING GRAHAM GREENE.
There is a startling freshness deep down in these poems, the work of a writer for whom the ever-sharp world exerts attractive and repulsive forces in equal measure. Hopkinson's second novel confirms the promise of her award-winning ''Brown Girl in the Ring'' (1998). With you will find 2 solutions. A memoir of disintegration under the stresses of noncommunication, divorce and dumb decisions even while living in Sunnyvale, the ground zero of West Coast optimism.
GROUCHO: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx. THE BLACK SWAN: A Memoir. Turtle Point, paper, $14. ) A witty, sparkling memoir despite its principal matter: two decades of encounters with psychotherapists who were, with one splendid exception, remote, inappropriately involved or just peculiar. By Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb. By John Colapinto. ) BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE. In a vigorous Caribbean-flavored ''patwa, '' she tells the tale of Tan-Tan, a young girl too full of life to be broken by abuse on a prison planet. Two brothers, both writers of distinguished fiction, tell how they managed to lose more than $300, 000 of their family's inheritance. Sturgeon was one of a handful of writers who helped create modern science fiction in the 1940's and 50's. An unusual exercise, akin to an exposition of the English author's poetics, this book is composed of long Socratic essays set in a far future that oddly resembles the ancient past.
GOLD DIGGER: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce. The author of ''The Mind-Body Problem'' explores the darker side of the conflict of ideas in physics between relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which find expression in the structure of the novel. A slender, touching, imaginative first novel set in Australia; its title characters are the invisible friends of an opal miner's daughter, and things go wrong from the moment the miner, drunk, loses Pobby and Dingan. YEMEN: The Unknown Arabia.
An outstanding biography, written by the former chief music critic for The Sunday Times of London, who argues persuasively that Berlioz was ''the greatest French composer between Rameau and Debussy. PublicAffairs, $28. ) Arthur Levine/Scholastic, $25. ) A first collection of refreshingly adventure-filled short stories, all concerned with the way huge geopolitical forces can change the texture of small individual lives in distant places. Harvard University, $29. )
By Michael Paterniti. THE SOCIAL LIVES OF DOGS: The Grace of Canine Company. By Theodore Sturgeon. SPINNING BLUES INTO GOLD: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records. A novel that ponders why crime stories so fascinate us while telling a hair-raising tale of a kidnapping gone wrong, using five narrative points of view without ever getting confused. A sequel to ''The End of Vandalism, '' set in the same bleak farm community, this novel centers on the ex-vandal, now a plumber (gone straight more from detachment than maturity), as he confronts the breakup of his marriage. THE UNEXPECTED LEGACY OF DIVORCE: A 25 Year Landmark Study. A big collection (768 pages) of untheoretical, unpolitical, vivid writing about dancing by a critic who maintained for 25 years that art was about beauty, not ideas. The author, it is worth knowing, is 21 years old.