PAPERBACK PICKS

BLOODBROTHERS Richard Price (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction, $10, first published in 1979) Richard Price (Clockers) is a writer so in love with his own hot-bloodedness you can almost hear him panting in the background. Bloodbrothers is the story of a young tough struggling to break out of his working-class world. The dialogue is rappy and true, and Price knows how to draw us into the beat of his mean streets. B ME: STORIES OF MY LIFE Katharine Hepburn (Ballantine, $5.99, 1991) Hepburn's life is, if you ask her, filled with luck, by gum. Just don't look for any average, messy, human longing and pain beneath the good fortune. She tells marvelous stories, oh my, yes, especially about her glorious career and the men she met along the way. B

BACKLASH: THE UNDECLARED WAR AGAINST AMERICAN WOMEN Susan Faludi (Anchor, $12.50, 1991) For nearly 500 pages, Faludi's best-seller takes aim at the normally veiled maneuvers of media moguls, business executives, and politicians. She aims to show how this elite of mostly male and mostly pale opinion makers has in the past decade propagated images of women that are reactionary, degrading, and false. A-

THE DEVIL'S CANDY: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES GOES TO HOLLYWOOD Julie Salamon (Delta, $12.50, 1991) The question of why good people make bad movies has never been answered more persuasively than in this exquisitely detailed acccount of the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities. A

COMPLETELY MAD: A HISTORY OF THE COMIC BOOK AND MAGAZINE Maria Reidelbach (Little, Brown, $24.95, 1991) Mad was the first satirical publication in history to be read mostly by children. Now the children have grown up, and though they might not have learned much in college, they do have coffee tables. Completely 'Mad' will give them a lot of choice artwork from all the magazine's eras. B+

SOUTHERN DAUGHTER: THE LIFE OF MARGARET MITCHELL Darden Asbury Pyron (HarperPerennial, $15, 1991) Scarlett O'Hara was a pip, but Mitchell was a piece of work. In this devoutly academic biography, Pyron describes a Southern belle who took a job as a newspaperwoman at 22 but left it four years later to devote her life to a series of real and imaginary ailments. After GWTW, she never wrote another thing, except for some 10,000 letters. B