Homer & Langley
E.L. Doctorow (Random House)
* SEPT. 1 Inspired by the story of the real-life Collyer brothers — wealthy, eccentric inhabitants of early 20th century New York City — Doctorow tells the tale of siblings Homer and Langley, whose lives are irrevocably altered after Spanish flu kills their parents. Life in their Fifth Avenue mansion grows increasingly bizarre after Langley, having been gassed in World War I, returns home, intent on embarking on science projects and building a collection of newspaper clippings; Homer, meanwhile, is slowly going blind.
A Date at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
* SEPT. 8 Lorrie Moore — best known for her short-story collection “Birds of America” — has written a novel about the days and months before the US went to war against Iraq, as seen through the eyes of a 20-year-old Midwestern college student, who finds herself growing increasingly alienated from her life back home on the potato farm. Excerpted in The New Yorker, Moore’s coming-of-age story lays bare the fissures in American society as one young woman is forced to confront not just the changes in the world around her, but in herself.
The Lost Symbol
Dan Brown (Doubleday)
* SEPT. 15 Brown’s new novel — the sequel to “The Da Vinci Code” — is already No. 1 on Amazon weeks before its release. (No surprise there: “The Da Vinci Code” is the bestselling hardcover adult novel ever.) The thriller follows protagonist Robert Langdon over an intense 12-hour period. “Embargoed, review-proof and will sell more copies in its first day than most books sell in ten years,” said Jonathan Segura of Publishers Weekly.
Little Bird Of Heaven
Joyce Carol Oates (ECCO)
* SEPT. 15 Oates has set her latest novel in the late twentieth century, in a mythical town in upstate New York, where a young mother has been found murdered — and two men, her estranged husband and her lover, are the main suspects. In classic Oates style, things take a turn for the Gothic when the the dead woman’s son and her lover’s daughter become obsessed with one another.
Blood’s A Rover
James Ellroy (Knopf)
* SEPT. 22 Ellroy sets this anticipated political noir, the final installment of his “Underworld USA Trilogy,” in one of the most tense periods in American history: 1968, just after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Ellroy weaves together the lives of three men — an enforcer of J. Edgar Hoover, a private detective, and an ex-cop turned drug dealer building a casino for the mob in the Dominican Republic. Publishers Weekly’s Segura told The Post that Ellroy’s latest is “impossible to put down.”
A Change in Altitude
Anita Shreve (Little, Brown)
* SEPT. 22 Shreve, perhaps best known for her bestselling “The Pilot’s Wife,” sets her new book in Kenya, where a young couple, just married, moves for a year, thrilled with anticipation for this adventure. After an accident on a climbing trip on Mount Kenya, however, the wife, Margaret, has to come to terms with a year that has quickly turned from a fantasy into a nightmare.
The Year of the Flood Margaret Atwood
(Nan. A Talese)
* SEPT. 22 One of the English language masters of the dystopian novel, Atwood paints one of her most chilling portraits yet: a world in which a flood has wiped out nearly every human on earth. “This is Atwood at her wittiest, deliciously cognizant of the foibles of human nature,” said Atwood’s editor Nan Talese. “Rarely have I looked forward so much to an Atwood publication and I have published Margaret Atwood for 33 years.”
Juliet, Naked
Nick Hornby (Riverhead)
* SEPT. 29 ” ‘Juliet, Naked’ is Nick Hornby writing on themes his fans hope for — the power of music, fandom gone too far, and complicated relationships,” said Hornby’s editor Geoffrey Kloske. In his latest novel, Hornby tells the story about a once-promising musician who starts corresponding with a woman who’s suddenly single and thousands of miles away.
Her Fearful Symmetry
Audrey Niffenegger (Scribner)
* SEPT. 29 The power of twinhood is one of the themes of Niffenegger’s long-awaited follow up to “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” Teenage twins from Chicago inherit the London apartment of their mother’s twin sister. When they move into the flat, which abuts a huge cemetery, they discover that the spectre of their dead aunt haunts their new life.
City Boy
My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s
Edmund White (Bloomsbury)
* SEPT. 29 In his 23 books, novelist and literary critic White has become one of the premier chroniclers of New York City intellectual life and the gay world. Most of his books are novels influenced by his own life, but in this non-fiction work, White unabashedly turns the pen on himself and the dozens of writers and artists he met in his years coming of age as a gay man in New York.
The Wild Things
Dave Eggers (Mcsweeney’s)
* OCT. 1 The much-loved children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” comes out as a film this fall, directed by Spike Jonze with a screenplay co-written with Dave Eggers. In “The Wild Things” — available in both hardcover and fur-covered editions — Eggers novelizes the screenplay version of Maurice Sendak’s original story about a boy named Max who runs away to live with the Wild Things after things get tough at home.
The Children’s Book
A.S. Byatt (Knopf)
* OCT. 6 Long-listed for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize, “The Children’s Book” tells the tale of a Victorian-era children’s book author who takes an artistic runaway into her London home. This act of charity, however, reveals a household that is coming apart at the seams. Byatt takes her characters into World War I, along the way showing how the world both inside and outside their home is disintegrating.
Manhood for Amateurs
Michael Chabon (Harper)
* OCT. 6 In this touching, hilarious collection of essays, novelist Chabon reflects on his life as a husband, father of four, son and friend. Jonathan Burnham, Chabon’s publisher, said the book “is a moving, funny, beautifully written memoir about being a child, then a father to children, and all the strangeness of male adulthood. It’s a constant delight.”
True Compass
Edward M. Kennedy (Twelve)
* OCT. 6 Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who passed away last week of brain cancer at the age of 77, was influenced both by the privileges, responsibilities and, some would say, curses of his family name, but also by the incredible period of history in which he worked as a legislator — from campaigning for his older brother John F. Kennedy to fighting to pass health care reform.
Sweet Thunder
The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson
Wil Haygood (Knopf)
* OCT. 13 Sugar Ray Robinson, one of the best boxers of all time, was born into poverty in the Midwest in 1921. When his mother moved her family to Harlem, Robinson started boxing and quickly became a well-known figure in the neighborhood. Soon enough he was world famous not just as a boxer, but also as a symbol of black America in a racially charged era. Author Haygood is also the biographer of Sammy Davis Jr.
Chronic City
Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday)
* OCT. 13 Lethem, who’s made a career out of writing (mostly) about Brooklyn, moves over to Manhattan in his new novel, with a kooky cast of characters seemingly drawn from real life: a former child star whose life now consists of fancy dinner parties, a pop critic with a marijuana addiction, a ghostwriter, and a former firebrand now working for the mayor. “It’s a big, sprawling and gorgeous book with hints of his earlier novels — sci-fi elements, magical realism — but also not like anything he’s done before,” said Segura.
Dracula: The Un-Dead
Dacre Stoker And Ian Holt
(Dutton)
* OCT. 13 Vampire stories have lately come into vogue, but in “Dracula: The Undead,” the great-grand-nephew of Bram Stoker, the original author of “Dracula,” tries to bring the legend back to its roots. Based on Stoker’s own notes for a story he died before finishing, this picks up 25 years after the end of Stoker’s tale, when Dracula supposedly dies by dissolving into dust.
Highest Duty
My Search for What Really Matters
Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger with Jeffrey Zaslow
(William Morrow)
* OCT. 13 The story of US Airways Flight 1549 — piloted by Captain Chesley Sullenberger into the Hudson River after engine failure — became an uplifting parable in a time of economic hardship and despair. In this book, Sullenberger shows that his safe landing was not so much a miracle as the culmination of his years of experience as a pilot.
Look At The Birdie
Kurt Vonnegut (Delacorte)
* OCT. 20 The juvenalia of famous authors is always grist for a publishing mill eager to explore the author’s early influences and style. In “Look at the Birdie,” 14 of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished short stories from the post-World War II years — before he wrote such American classics as “Slaughterhouse Five” — have now been collected.
Invisible
Paul Auster (Henry Holt)
* OCT. 27 In this reimagining of the coming-of-age novel, the Brooklyn-based Paul Auster moves his characters between 1967 and 2007, and Columbia University, Paris and the Caribbean. In 1967, a 20-year-old student gets caught up in a love triangle with a Frenchman and his girlfriend, and the results are both violent and life-changing.
Growing Up Bin Laden
Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
Najwa Bin Laden and Omar Bin Laden with Jean Sasson
(St. Martin’s Press)
* OCT. 27 Najwa bin Laden married her cousin, Osama bin Laden, when she was 15 years old. She is also the mother of 11 of his children. Omar bin Laden is the fourth-born son of Najwa and Osama. Though now both are estranged from Osama, they are uniquely qualified to tell the inside story of what home life was like with the most wanted man in the world: In a word, terrifying.
You Better Not Cry
Augusten Burroughs
(St. Martin’s)
* OCT. 27 In his memoirs “Running With Scissors,” “Dry,” and “Magical Thinking,” Burroughs laid bare the dysfunction of his family with poignancy and wit. In “You Better Not Cry,” the dysfunction is still present, but the lens has been narrowed to the Christmas season with his trademark humor intact. In one essay, he constructs a gingerbread tenement building instead of a gingerbread house.
Last Night In Twisted River
John Irving (Random House)
* OCT. 27 John Irving has said that his 12th novel was inspired in part by the Bob Dylan song “Tangled Up in Blue.” The story begins in 1954, when a boy and his father go on the run after a near-fatal case of mistaken identity. In the book’s 50-year span, Irving tackles the big themes — love and hate, family and death — in an exceptionally violent, yet moving, tale.
The Humbling
Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
* NOV. 2 Roth has always been preoccupied with aging and death, and his 30th book is no exception. In “The Humbling,” his protagonist — a once-successful theater actor in his sixties — finds himself totally lost: on stage, where his confidence has disappeared; and at home, where he is now alone. Of course, Roth brings sex into his story of decay, which naturally has some unintended consequences.
Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer
(Little, Brown)
* NOV. 2 At barely 30, with two critically acclaimed novels already under his belt, what can the precocious Foer do next? If his new effort is any indication, become a parent and then write a book about one’s quest to grapple with the moral and ethical implications of what we eat. In his first non-fiction book, Foer goes gonzo on the American food supply.
Under The Dome
Stephen King (Scribner)
* NOV. 10 King’s latest is set in small-town Maine, like the vast majority of his books. And like most of his books, it concerns something seriously spooky going on in this particular small town, which suddenly becomes enveloped by a force field wreaking havoc on it and the outside world. A few town citizens band together to try and figure out what’s going on — before it’s too late.
Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro (Knopf)
* NOV. 15 In these nine new stories by the much-admired Munro, she tackles some familiar themes — troubled marriages, dead children — and some new ones including a story about a Russian female mathematician in the nineteenth century who travels around Europe.
Last Words
George Carlin (Free Press)
* NOV. 17 When comedian Carlin died in June 2008, he left behind a nearly finished autobiography, chronicling a decades-long career whose best-known legacy is his 1972 monologue, “Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television.” In “Last Words,” Carlin retraces, with characteristically caustic humor, his years on the American comedy scene.
The Original of Laura
Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf)
* NOV. 17 Nabokov left specific instructions for his last work — which he inscribed on 138 index cards, by hand — to be burned upon his death. But his wife Vera did not obey his wishes. Now, Nabokov’s son Dmitri has taken those index cards and published the story that his father never intended to see the light of day.
Pirate Latitudes
Michael Crichton
(Harpercollins)
* NOV. 24 Crichton, who died in November, was best known as the author of “Jurassic Park,” but he was a versatile storyteller. “Pirate Latitudes,” as his publisher Jonathan Burnham put it, “is a wonderful, swashbuckling historical adventure story set in the 17th century, complete with hidden treasure and evil buccaneers.”