Jay Mcinerney

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you still might make the kind of snap decision that will lead you to buy it.That's the thinking of publishers, who see every one of a book cover's components -- title, design, blurbs from critics and other writers -- as marketing tools. Nothing happens by accident on the cover of a book, not even the author's biography. (Granted, many author photos appear to have happened by accident, but that's a topic for another day.)The author bio presents an obvious problem for first novelists: They have no track record.

This is a good day to go to the Owl Bar at the Belvedere Hotel, order something made with gin and toast F. Scott Fitzgerald's courage as a writer.Fitzgerald would have been 100 years old today, and he was a very brave writer indeed. The late Nelson Algren, America's toughest novelist, celebrates Fitzgerald's grace as a writer under the pressure of his troubled life in a newly published book-length essay called "Nonconformity: writing on writing."Fitzgerald used to drink in an earlier incarnation of the Owl Bar, often and heavily, when the times were good and sometimes when they were very, very bad. He's said to have favored gin rickeys, perhaps more gin than rickey.

Boiler Room" gets off to an intriguing start, but there's less here than meets the eye. Made with pumping energy and visual brio by first-time filmmaker Ben Younger, this morality tale of 1990s greed and ambition is derivative, but honestly so. It wears its references on its sleeve, actually quoting David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" and paying inventive homage to Michael Douglas' famous monologues in "Wall Street."

It can be argued -- as novelist Jay McInerney did in his wine column in a recent issue of House & Garden magazine -- that the cocktail hour is the brash American equivalent of British teatime. While there's much to be said for a martini, there's also a great deal in favor of tea -- the accoutrements are so charmingly traditional, for instance: teapots, tea cups and saucers, silver spoons and tiny tea napkins. Unless you're one of 71 artists in the "100 Teapots" show at Baltimore Clayworks (through Feb. 24)

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," by Haruki Murakami. Knopf. 613 pages. $26.95.Having lived for a decade in the United States and written novels like "Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World," in which the characters read only European literature, listen to Western music from Jazz to the Beatles, and feast on spaghetti and potato salad, Haruki Murakami was compared misleadingly to Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is Murakami's first novel since his return to Japan, and it is a mesmerizing, original work.

THE INFORMERS. By Bret Easton Ellis. Alfred A. Knopf. 226 pages. $22.SO WHAT do you do after you've written the sickest novel of the decade?That seems to be the defining question of Brat Pack writer Bret Easton Ellis' career these days, and it's not an easy one to answer. Three years ago, Mr. Ellis' incendiary novel "American Psycho," dominated the public imagination with its eerie depiction of a Wall Street hotshot who has a yen for blood. The scenes of female torture and mutilation -- which were widely misinterpreted as a sign of misogynistic tendencies on the part of the author himself -- turned thousands of stomachs and certainly caused more than one missed night of sleep.

''Glamorama,'' by Bret Easton Ellis. Knopf. 504 pages. $25Write what you know. That dictat has been delivered by editors to novelists since Samuel Richardson wrote ``Pamela.'' For Bret Easton Ellis, this mantra worked so successfully that his first novel, ``Less than Zero,'' written in 1983 while he was a 19-year-old student at the elite Bennington College, received significant critical attention.``Less'' detailed the lives of disaffected L.A. white youth with too much money, too much access to drugs and too little motivation to do much but spend and snort.

For its January issue, Vanity Fair bows to coolness and the "PF" crowd by putting smoking "Pulp Fiction" star Uma Thurman and her "disturbing beauty" on the cover. So what if the 25-year-old actress has remarkably little to say? Her comeback gig with John Travolta and last year's Oscar nomination poem by Dave Letterman ("Uma, Oprah, Oprah, Uma") have supplied her with enough cover cred for at least another year.Uma's the Queen of Quentinville, and Quentin Tarantino does still rule. Just ask Mr. Travolta, who pronounces in an interview in the year-end issue of Rolling Stone, "If there's a new feeling in Hollywood, it's because Quentin was the first person in a while to feel like we could treat an audience with intelligence.

Reading "Et Tu, Babe" is sort of like dropping a tab of methamphetamine and watching a simulcast of MTV, a three-ring circus and "Saturday Night Live" while a Guns N' Roses tape blares from the headphones of your Walkman.Got all that? From the opening of Mark Leyner's hysterically convoluted new novel, your brain is assailed with a dizzying array of hallucinogenic scenes, twisted characters and ridiculously improbable plot developments that is the closest thing to sensory overload achieved through the written word.

"A Model World and Other Stories, Michael Chabon, 207 pages, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, N.Y., $18.95.MICHAEL CHABON wrote his novel "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" as his thesis at the graduate writing workshop of the University of California at Irvine. "The Mysteries" earned him his M.F.A. and a $155,000 advance from his publisher.The Mysteries also made him a very hot young author. Chabon was about the same age as was F. Scott Fitzgerald when he published his first novel, "This Side of Paradise.