SAINT JOAN: Didion’s collected non-fiction comes out in one volume next month.

Fiction
THOMAS PYNCHON  delivers Against the Day (Penguin Press, November 21), his first novel since 1997’s Mason & Dixon. In an unusual twist, the notoriously reclusive Pynchon himself wrote the editorial description for Amazon about this novel spanning the period from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to the years just after World War I: “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places.” He adds: “No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

The rest of the fall’s fiction has a similarly dour cast.  CORMAC MCCARTHY ’s The Road (Knopf, October 2) unfolds on a blasted, futuristic landscape where a man and a child try to walk to safety.  CHRIS ADRIAN ’s The Floating Hospital (McSweeney’s, October 1) takes place after the earth has been subsumed by seven miles of water.

Things quiet down with  CHARLES FRAZIER ’s long-awaited follow-up to Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons (Random House, October 3), the tale of a man sent out into Indian country to run a trading post.  EDNA O’BRIEN  also takes a trip down memory lane with The Light of Evening (Houghton Mifflin, October 1), a lyrical fiction about a woman awaiting her famous novelist daughter’s return to Ireland.

DAVE EGGERS  has gone a bit out of his way — to Sudan, in fact — for his new non-fiction novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney’s, October 1), in which a Sudanese refugee escapes to Kenya and resettles in the United States. Fellow Believer editor  HEIDI JULAVITS  also returns to the fiction form with The Uses of Enchantment (Doubleday, October 17), in which a girl goes missing from a private school.

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The drought of short stories turns into a flood this fall with  ALICE MUNRO ’s The View from Castle Rock (Knopf, November 7). If you need a refresher course in Munro worship, pick up her Carried Away (Everyman, September 26), which is introduced by fellow Canadian  MARGARET ATWOOD, who herself has a collection out this month, Moral Disorder (Nan A. Talese, September 19). Also keep an eye out for  SUSANNA CLARKE ’s darkly magical collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu (Bloomsbury, October 17), and the surprisingly hefty  THE STORIES OF MARY GORDON  (Pantheon, October 3).

Readers who want to travel with their fiction will have plenty to choose from. Sudanese-born  LEILA ABOULELA  is issuing The Translator (Black Cat, October 1), the tale of a woman who falls in love with a Scottish Islam scholar. In  JOHN LE CARRÉ ’s The Mission Song (Little, Brown, September 19), a Catholic missionary finds himself pressed into service as an interpreter for British intelligence.  LYDIE SALVAYRE ’s Everyday Life (Dalkey Archive, November 14) brings an office-life tale from France to these shores. Editor  DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES  reveals the width and depth of Arab fiction with The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction (Anchor, October 10).

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).