See you later alligator.

LAST FEBRUARY TITLES: Wm. F. Buckley Jr.'s See You Later Alligator (Doubleday, $16.95) concerns Blackford Oakes in Cuba, in the aftermath of the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion (see review, below).

Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil-Rights Movement (Arbor, $16.95), by James Farmer, is the author's account of his engagement in the civil-rights movement as the founder of the Congress on Racial Equality.

Peter Stansky's Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts (Princeton, $27.50) argues that Morris's commitment to radical politics must be seen as the stimulus to his manifold cultural preoccupations (institutionalized in the English arts and crafts movement), which were directly dependent on the notion that revolution was necessary in order to make art an irreducible component of life itself.

COMING IN MARCH: Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (Morrow, $15.95), by Thomas Sowell, argues that many self-styled contemporary "Marxists" may be said to have invented a series of "modern concoctions" bearing little, if any, relationship to the ideas of the master--whose contribution to modern economics is in any event "virtually zero."

In The Spoils of Time: A World History from the Dawn of Civilization through the Early Renaissance (Doubleday, $19.95) C. V. Wedgwood offers a redoubtable--and readable--historical and cultural synthesis.

Facing Nature (Knopt, $13.95) is the fifth volume of verse by the novelist, critic, and poet John Updike. . . . In Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Random House, $17.95), Cormac McCarthy has created a haunting and original novel of Texas in the early nineteenth century.

COMING IN APRIL: In Grave New World (Oxford, $17.95), Michael A. Ledeen (formerly a foreign correspondent and advisor to Secretary of State Alexander Haig) warns that the unpredictability of American and Soviet foreign policy gives rise to serious global risk.