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ShareWill Philip Roth’s “final” Zuckerman novel finally be final? Can Alice Sebold triumph with another spectacular-first-sentence tale (“When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily”)? Is it possible that Steven Pinker will keep writing versions of the same book forever?
Ah, the suspense is killing us. But that’s what makes lifting the fall-season curtain as much fun for book people as waiting for a “Sopranos” climax or Britney’s next fiasco is for culturati of other stripes. Herewith, 26 fall arrivals to be anticipated with bated breath.
FICTION
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz (Riverhead, September). Praised mightily for his first book of fiction, “Drown” (1996), the Dominican American writer ends a long silence with this exuberant first novel about Oscar de Leon, a “ghetto nerd” and sci-fi geek making sense of life between Paterson, N.J., and a curse from his ever-looming ancestral homeland.
“The Indian Clerk” by David Leavitt (Bloomsbury, September). Leavitt, whose early reputation as one of his generation’s top fiction writers slipped over time behind that of peers, will recover ground with this ambitious novel drawn from the relationship between two great 20th-century mathematicians: England’s G.H. Hardy and Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.
“Cion” by Zakes Mda (Picador, September). For a long time, white writers dominated South African literature—Paton, Brink, Gordimer, Coetzee. Post-apartheid, Zakes Mda, only 58, looks like the great South African novelist of his generation, a writer rich in both imagination and ironic political attitude. In this daring effort, Mda brings South Africa and the land where he teaches, the United States, together—“Cry the Beloved Country” meets “Beloved.”
“An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England” by Brocke Clarke (Algonquin, September). Hilarious, breakthrough novel for Clarke (“The Ordinary White Boy” and other works) about what happens to the accidental torcher of Emily Dickinson’s home when the houses of Twain, Frost, Emerson and others also start catching fire.
“Slacker Girl” by Alexandra Koslow (Plume, September). Playful first novel from a Kutztown University grad that compares workaholic New York City and preferable ways of living.
“The Almost Moon” by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown, October). The author of the endless best-seller “The Lovely Bones” returns with her second novel, about a middle-age woman whose lifelong tensions with her mother explode.
“Exit Ghost” by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, October). The writer Zuckerman, primary fictional alter ego of the multiple-prize-winning veteran, is said to pass into his counterlife with Roth’s latest. You know, the way we’re now supposedly done with Harry Potter? Believe it when you don’t see it—the next one, that is.
“The Bad Girl” by Mario Vargas Llosa (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, October). Like Carlos Fuentes and Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa continues to exemplify the literary Latin American novelist at his cosmopolitan best: droll, socially aware, yet equally conscious of life’s pleasures. His latest chronicles a decades-long love affair, played out in many venues.
“Matrimony” by Joshua Henkin (Pantheon, October). In this classically composed second novel of a couple who meet and fall in love at their liberal arts college in the Berkshires, Henkin, much praised for “Swimming Across the Hudson” (1997), sensitively examines the 15 years of love and marriage that follow.
“Lost Paradise” by Cees Nooteboom (Grove/Atlantic, October). One of Dutch literature’s masters, Nooteboom steers his inventive, modernist attention in an unusual direction in this taut tale of rape, memory, and happenstance.
“A Pigeon and a Boy” by Meir Shalev (Schocken, October). Less well-known than Israeli peers such as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, Shalev, who won Israel’s prestigious Brenner Prize for this novel, offers a beautifully told story of a middle-aged Israeli bird-watcher and the woman he has loved since childhood.
“The Quiet Girl” by Peter Hoeg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November). Hoeg’s “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” (1993) dazzled readers and spurred a brief translation boom for Scandinavian fiction into English. Now the Danish author offers the closest thing since to his mesmerizing debut, a thriller about an internationally famous circus clown in serious debt.
NONFICTION
“The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” by David Halberstam (Hyperion, September). Last book by the distinguished journalist and author, about another war Halberstam felt “never should have happened,” completed just before his fatal car crash earlier this year.
“Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” by Maryanne Wolf (HarperCollins, September). Far from being born to read, Tufts psychology professor Wolf argues, we must master the skill and it alters our brain, though in highly helpful ways. Brilliant and eye-opening.
“The Death of Sigmund Freud” by Mark Edmundson (Bloomsbury, September). Nuanced portrait of the last two years of the founder of psychoanalysis, by the eminent University of Virginia cultural critic and author of “Why Read?”
“The Iranian Time Bomb” by Michael Ledeen (St. Martin’s, September). AEI scholar Ledeen, author of many books on the Middle East, contends that America’s confrontation with Iran is inevitable and necessary.
“Garibaldi: Citizen of the World” by Alfonso Scirocco (Princeton, September). Right behind June’s highly interpretive “Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero” by Lucy Riall (Yale), a thorough biography of the heroic “sword” of Italian unification, also timed for this bicentennial year of his birth.
“The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature” by Steven Pinker (Viking, September). Does the distinguished Harvard professor and popularizer have anything new to say after “The Language Instinct,” “Words and Rules,” “How the Mind Works” and “The Blank Slate”? Answer in five words—Yes, some things are new.
“Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy” by Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg (Rowman & Littlefield, September). Americans and particularly American political cartoons increasingly demonize Muslims and Islam—so say Gottschalk, a Wesleyan University religion professor, and coauthor Greenberg, a recent Wesleyan graduate.
“World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” by Norman Podhoretz (Doubleday, September). The former Commentary editor and warrior of American conservatism argues that Islamofascism is real and must be fought as steadfastly as Nazism and Fascism in World War II.
“One Drop” by Bliss Broyard (Little, Brown, September). Anatole Broyard, book critic for the New York Times for decades, revealed to his family two months before his 1990 death that he was “black.” This is his daughter’s memoir of how she subsequently explored her father’s life and her new heritage.
“Schulz and Peanuts” by David Michaelis (HarperCollins, October). First full-scale biography of the St. Paul, Minn., cartoonist who created a $1.2 billion worldwide empire before his death in 2000.
“Bears: A Brief History” by Bernd Brunner (Yale, October). Brighter than the average book about a species, a fascinating exploration of how many cultures see bears as almost human. Old ursine in a new bottle.
“The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution and the Search for Peking Man” by Amir Aczel (Riverhead, October). Extraordinary story of the great French Jesuit theologian and paleontologist who battled to reconcile evolution and Scripture long before our era’s intelligent-design wars.
“A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life” by J. Craig Venter (Penguin, October). Firsthand history of the 2001 sequencing of the human genome by the scientist who pulled it off in tandem with the government-sponsored Human Genome Project.
“Modernism” by Peter Gay (W.W. Norton, November). The magisterial, 84-year-old scholar of European culture (“The Enlightenment,” “Freud,” “Weimar Culture”) delivers a major one-volume history of the concept that dominated 20th-century aesthetics.
