CARL HIAASEN ’s Nature Girl (Knopf, November 16) is about a bipolar woman who takes the law into her own hands. Scottish crime master IAN RANKIN will unleash Bleeding Hearts (Little, Brown, November 15), which is about an assassin who runs out of luck. Brainy RICHARD POWERS explores the farthest reaches of the human brain in The Echo Maker (FSG, October 3); MICHAEL CONNELLY visits Echo Park (Little, Brown, October 9). RICHARD FORD follows up his Pulitzer-winning Independence Day with the further adventures of its hero, Frank Bascombe (introduced in 1986’s The Sportswriter), with The Lay of the Land (Knopf, October 24).the further And the day before the Nobel Prize is announced, the second volume in the collected works of PHILIP ROTH (Library of America, October 5) will be in book stores, awaiting good news from Stockholm.
Non-fiction
Those who discovered JOAN DIDION for the first time with her powerful memoir The Year of Magical Thinking have plenty of catching up to do, and they can do nearly all of it in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order To Live (Everyman’s Library, October 17), which collects all her non-fiction from 1968 to 2003 in one volume. PATTI SMITH tells her tales of rock-and-roll life in Just Kids: From Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel, a Life of Art and Friendship (Ecco, October 1); GORE VIDAL shakes out a few gems in Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (Doubleday, November 7).
Fall is traditionally biography season, and this one includes a couple of standouts: DAVID CANNADINE ’s Mellon: An American Life (Knopf, October 5) and Pulitzer Prize winner DAVID NASAW ’s Andrew Carnegie (Penguin Press, October 24). And Rome’s two famous Caesars have a volume each: ANTHONY EVERITT ’s Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor (Random House, October 24) and ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY ’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus (Yale, September 22).
Caesar may have ruled Rome but James Bond controlled the dreams of young boys everywhere, or so says SIMON WINDER in The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond (FSG, October 25). Another hero of adolescents everywhere, ALLEN GINSBERG, gets a series of tributes: Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression, edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters (City Lights, November 1); I Celebrated Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Viking, October 5); and First Journals: 1937–1952, edited by Bill Morgan and Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton (Da Capo, October 30).
In Being Arab (Verso, October 25), Lebanese journalist SAMIR KASSIR, who was assassinated last year, describes what it means to be Arab. JEFFREY GOLDBERG ’s Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Knopf, October 9) chronicles how working in an Israeli prison changed his feelings. And JIMMY CARTER will have another go at brokering peace in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Simon & Schuster, November 1).
The Daily Show and The Colbert Report will be all over the fall elections, but you’ll also want to check in with the author of Bullshit, HARRY FRANKFURT, who returns with On Truth (Knopf, November 2). Frank Rich gives the subject a political spin in The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth, from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina (Penguin Press, September 19). Newsweek’s MICHAEL ISIKOFF delivers Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown, October 3). BOB WOODWARD proposes to mop up with Inside Bush’s White House, the Second Term (Simon & Schuster, October 30).
