The Hunter himself was snorkeling off Batt Reef in Queensland on Monday morning, engaged in shooting a documentary and feeling himself in no danger, when he floated over a stingray that shouldn't have been startled, but was. The macabre details of his death -- that the poisoned, spiny tail struck in or near his heart, and the later revelation that he pulled it out just before he died -- aren't in dispute. But what the demise of a charming showman with a somewhat challenged concept of self-preservation means to the rest of the world is very much a hot issue, and some of the backtalk has barbs that would do a stingray proud.

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The exhilaration of riding has certainly shaken up Michael Korda, editor in chief at Simon & Schuster, who happens to be married to an "eventer." Korda has horses on about 100 acres of prime real estate in New York's Hudson Valley, and it follows, given his writerly output, that he'd have something to say about it. His recent "Country Matters," about work, if you can call it work, on his farm, if you can call it a farm, takes you into that upholstered realm of the well-to-do and assures you that they are in fact aware of the outside world, even if they can't exactly find it.

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Animal rights groups couldn't be expected to know what dog racing is all about, competitors said, and yet here they were, trying to wreck everything. They'd persuaded people on the East Coast to spam a sponsor, and that had resulted in the company's yanking its support the day before the race. Mushers blamed the Humane Society of the United States and its even wickeder cousin, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "They don't think we should run dogs at all," fumed one competitor. "They say we beat the teams to make them run themselves to death."

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At first, "Lucky" seems to bounce you into a state of half-belief. The rape itself, narrated at the very beginning of the book, is so merciless it's nearly impossible to absorb. The man beat her and tore at her; the shriveled object in the courtroom evidence bag was so stiff and black -- like ruined leather -- that it was hard to tell it was her blood-soaked underwear. Once Sebold goes back to her bookish family to repair herself, her household becomes an odd but dramatically rich place to begin to heal. The first thing her father asks her when she gets back home is whether she'd like something to eat. "That would be nice," she says, "considering the only thing I've had in my mouth in the last twenty-four hours is a cracker and a cock."

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In her statement of purpose, poet Pattiann Rogers says she wants to discover the spiritual attributes of contemporary cosmology -- to make time and geology perceptible to the heart. From chick peas through hermit crabs all the way up to the Milky Way, she visually consumes all of nature, as if each eyeball blink seals a rapturous image on her brain.

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Two of the dead creatures were rare rhinos: one black, one white. A hippo died in transit. A number of rare cranes, a pair of otters and four cheetah cubs -- done in by a chemical found in solvents and antifreeze -- also perished. (Doesn't every cat owner know by now that animals are nuts for the sweet taste of antifreeze?) Cynics might ask: What were a bunch of expensive cheetah cubs doing in a garage, anyway?

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Being a pansexual, turn-of-the-millennium rolling stone has to be a lonely job. Because she's introduced in such a violent fashion and so soon thereafter takes on the quiet life of a nursing-home employee, Caroline is wired to explode, and sure enough, she does, but not until someone throws a drink on the mayor at a town picnic. The ensuing chaos quickly becomes a riot. Seeing a handcuffed man being savaged by two angry cops, Caroline hefts a baseball bat and swings for one of the uniformed heads. But nobody sees her do it: "In one sweet move I had skipped sideways about a hundred feet," she says, and she's free to go on the lam, finally winding up clear on the other side of the country in a different kind of trouble.

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That's what happens to Jane Goodall in Laura Zigman's first novel, "Animal Husbandry," and Jane actually does something about it. She is not the famous Jane Goodall of primatology, but a TV producer whose passionate boyfriend proclaims every kind of believable love for her only to wake up one morning looking at her as if she were some kind of wart. After caving in to the common temptation to cry a lot and guzzle Jack Daniel's from the bottle, Jane hits the library to discover the cause of male amatory weirdness. Newly armed with such works as Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene," she retires to her cramped bedroom, now dubbed the Institute for the Study and Prevention of Male Behavior, and proceeds to ferret out why bulls need variety and what the desire to replicate one's DNA has to do with her empty apartment and her broken heart.

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Contrary to what you may have heard, not all of the paper's famous in-house skirmishes culminate in violence. Only once did an editor get popped by a writer, and that was over 10 years ago. Nevertheless, the latest eliminations, terminations and related maneuvers have industry wags sniffing for blood. The weekly cartoon page -- featuring Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" and Lynda Barry's "Ernie Pook's Comeek" -- has been unapologetically scrapped to make room for a sports section. Humorist Cynthia Heimel, whose biweekly column has run in the paper for 17 years, has been given the gate. The long-standing confusion at the Voice Literary Supplement far predates the new editor-in-chief's arrival. That mess is straightened out, too, much to the dismay of some -- but not all -- of the parties involved. Last but not least, another freshly fired columnist, Hugh Pearson, is talking lawsuits.

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"The Vulnerable Observer" is tough going at first, since its six essays are so arbitrarily arranged it seems as if the book was structured backwards. First Behar ponderously defends her case, then she submits her four examples of "vulnerable" anthropological writing, and finally, she gets around to explaining in plain English what critics' objections to her methods have been. Getting into this book is like yanking a stubborn cork out of a bottle: Once the heavy work is done, the rewards are there for leisurely sampling.

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You don't have to share Yo's literary ambitions to understand her witchy charm. Julia Alvarez, author of "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" and "In The Time of the Butterflies," has a nearly irresistible way of portraying her poet-subject. Each chapter of this book is told from a different person's point of view, as if they all sat down with a tape recorder after a couple of drinks and uncorked their hidden agitations. Yo's mother, her frou-frou cousin Lucinda, the caretakers at Yo's old family place in the D.R. and a number of interested men are invited to spill the beans. Even her crazy stalker, a man she doesn't know, gets to have his say. They all believe she's selfish, yet undoubtedly trusting and kind. When Yo's (very personal) books get popular, though, these same people find themselves naked to the world, and they hate it. Still, they forgive her, because Yo has a knack for reconnecting people to the parts of themselves they've forgotten. She might even have the same effect on you.

Alvarez's style is blunt, but so light and eager it's absolutely captivating. Her eye for psychological detail can move the heart. And she's funny, too. Just one snag: Is writing such a sacred calling that it justifies Yo's casual destructiveness? At this book's least convincing moments, Alvarez comes close to saying yes. It's when she lets you consider her subject as a small, disobedient planet in the human galaxy that "Yo!" sheds the most light.

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Adams is best known for two earlier books, "Watership Down" and "The Plague Dogs," and for the films made from them. (He is also the author of "Traveler," a moving and perceptive biography of Robert E. Lee's legendary war horse.) None of these quite convey the striking and often scary atmosphere he brings to this new collection, a full 20 years after we last heard from him.

Aside from the rabbits' vocabulary, which can be distracting, there's nothing prissy or inconsequential here. Adams clearly understands a great deal about rabbits, surely among God's poor because, as the old saw goes, He made so many of them. Rabbits are not only prey to what Adams calls "the thousand enemies," but to the cruel whims of the seasons. But few people can conjure up weather like Adams can, and hardly anybody has ever made an overgrown field in England sound so gorgeous and full of promise.

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Whatever direction you approach Roiphe from, she's definitely a free-thinking welter of contradictions, a never-say-die feminist who's absolutely nuts about children. This book, her eleventh, is about what happens when her two causes mix. Drawing from personal experience, academic writing and a feminist canon that spans much of this century, "Fruitful" describes how the women's movement continues to sell mothers out. "We're shooting ourselves in the collective foot," she writes, and even radical readers will be forced, at times, to agree.

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Now 31, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang (her first name is from an ancestral poem; her middle from her mother's love of Tolstoy) was a Chinese studies major at Harvard when her great aunt's name popped up in a textbook. That great aunt, Chang Yu-i -- who had been, among other things, a bank president -- was born into an illustrious Shanghai family in 1900 and died in 1988. Her fate took its first unusual turn when she was three. One of her brothers was so moved by her screams when her feet were being bound that he persuaded Yu-i's mother to let the little girl go. "Sheng jing bing. Crazy, my amah said about Mama's decision," Chang Yu-i recalled during one of her hundreds of interviews with the author. Translation: Who would marry a girl like that?

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"My Summer with George" is proof that if you cook that theory too long, it cracks. The protagonist is Hermione Beldame, a middle-aged romance writer who thought she'd seen it all before falling for a man who is Eeyore's human double. George is mopey and potbellied, but he pesters Hermione, dates her and stands her up as if nothing else mattered. Naturally, she's nuts about him. Her summer with George is actually a summer without him, because whenever she needs her guy, he's out somewhere being typically male, i.e. No Damn Good.

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