FIRST COMES LOVE Marion Winik (Vintage, $12, first published in 1996) NPR commentator Winik married Tony knowing he was gay, HIV-positive, and into drugs. Elegiac AIDS memoir meets feminist confessional.

PICTURING THE WRECK Dani Shapiro (Plume, $10.95, 1996) Thirty years after sleeping with a patient and losing his family, psychoanalyst Solomon Grossman rediscovers his son. A gripping, quixotic novel.