The paradox of book publishing is that, just as everybody is lamenting a shortage of serious readers, our shelves are creaking with new books. By the end of this year, we're told, 175,000 new titles bearing a 2004 publication date will have coursed into the market. That's 50 percent more than we saw a decade ago. Who's reading? Plenty of you are. Trade publishers are actually reporting a slight uptick in sales, across most categories.
From the 60,000 books yet to be minted this fall, here is an early alert on a hundred or so that have piqued our interest. (Please note: they have yet to be reviewed on these pages.) The list may seem long -- for some, a lifetime of reading -- but look at it this way: It's less than half of one percent (.005!) of the number of titles the industry is offering this year: a shortlist if ever there was one.
The Fiction List
Literary Fiction
Author, Author, by David Lodge (Viking, Oct.). A great literary critic turns tables and novelizes a great novelist: Henry James.
Bad Dirt, by Annie Proulx (Scribner, Nov.). More stories about quirky Wyomingans, from America's "laureate of landscape."
Banishing Verona, by Margot Livesey (Holt, Nov.). The author of Eva Moves the Furniture offers a story of galvanic love between a pregnant woman and a carpenter.
Casanova in Bolzano, by Sandor Marai (Knopf, Nov.). The notorious lover meets his erotic match, at long last, and at the very end; by the author of Embers.
The Double, by José Saramago (Harcourt, Oct.). A depressed history teacher rents a video, spies a man who could be his twin, and sets out to find him.
The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips (Random House, Sept.). An archaeologist stakes his reputation on a scrap of Egyptian pornography; by the author of Prague.
Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry (Shoemaker & Hoard, Nov.). The latest installment in Berry's narrative of Port William, Ky.
Heir to the Glimmering World, by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton, Sept.). Set in the Bronx, the story of an immigrant clan and their eccentric American benefactor.
The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyle (Viking, Sept.). A virginal young man takes a job with Dr. Kinsey, the infamous sex researcher; by the author of Drop City.
Magic Seeds, by V.S. Naipaul (Knopf, Nov.). The hero of Half a Life is resurrected as an underground revolutionary in India.
The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth (Houghton, Oct.). Charles Lindbergh becomes president and the country swings hard right, into virulent anti-Semitism.
Villages, by John Updike (Knopf, Oct.). A coming-of-age story in which women -- many, many of them -- are a young man's defining teachers.
War Trash, by Ha Jin (Pantheon, Oct.). The author of Waiting now gives us a story about a Chinese POW held by Americans during the Korean War.
The Zigzag Way, by Anita Desai (Houghton, Nov.). The author of Fasting, Feasting offers this story of an American historian wandering Mexico in search of his ancestors.
Popular Fiction
Any Place I Hang My Hat, by Susan Isaacs (Scribner, Oct.). A young reporter sets out in search of the mother who abandoned her as a baby.
Human Capital, by Stephen Amidon (FSG, Oct.). A novel about American suburbanites, dirty little secrets and the allure of easy money.
I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (FSG, Nov.). College life in the sex-crazed, power-hungry '00s, by the author of Bonfire of the Vanities.
Light on Snow, by Anita Shreve (Little, Brown, Oct.). By the author of Eden Close: When a father and his daughter stumble upon an abandoned baby, family secrets begin to spill.
Mantrapped, by Fay Weldon (Grove, Dec.). A man and a woman brush past each other on the stairs of their local laundromat and end up switching souls; by the author of Auto da Fay.
Nights of Rain and Stars, by Maeve Binchy (Dutton, Sept.). Sudden tragedy electrifies the lives of a group of travelers in a tiny Greek village.
Outside Valentine, by Liza Ward (Holt, Sept.). Obsessed with a serial murderer, a young woman tries to heal ancient wounds.
