Fall Preview

The Most Anticipated Books of the Season

This fall, as temperatures cool and the lure of a warm chair grows, authors will be eager to sit you down and tell you a thing or two -- from former CIA director George Tenet to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, and from Alice McDermott to Stephen King.

Children's attentions, too, will be in high demand: Maurice Sendak makes a bid for them with his first pop-up book and Lemony Snicket with the last story in his wildly popular "Series of Unfortunate Events."

General Fiction

After This , by Alice McDermott (Farrar Straus Giroux, Sept.). An ordinary American family caught in the tempestuous and disorienting '60s.

Devotion , by Howard Norman (Houghton Mifflin, Feb.). A new marriage, a cordial in-law -- and a startlingly savage murder.

The Dissident , by Nell Freudenberger (Ecco, Sept.). A Chinese performance artist moves in with a wealthy, eccentric family in Los Angeles.

The Emperor's Children , by Claire Messud (Knopf, Sept.). A sharp satire of sophisticated New Yorkers who are alarmed by the prospect of reaching 30 before they reach success.

Exit A , by Anthony Swofford (Scribner, Jan.). The author of the gritty war memoir Jarhead gives us his first novel: a love story set on a military base in Japan.

The Lay of the Land , by Richard Ford (Knopf, Oct.). Continuing the cycle he began with The Sportswriter and Independence Day , Ford now puts his hero on the Jersey Shore -- as a real-estate agent.

Lisey's Story , by Stephen King (Scribner, Oct.). Lisey Landon, widow of a bestselling novelist, is suddenly forced to confront the demons of her husband's past.

Magic Time , by Doug Marlette (FSG, Sept.). A broken-down newspaper man returns from Manhattan to Mississippi to face his deeply repressed youth.

Memorial , by Bruce Wagner (Knopf, Sept.). Family dramas swirl around an international architectural competition to commemorate the 2004 tsunami.

Paint It Black , by Janet Fitch (Little, Brown, Sept.). From the author of White Oleander , the story of a young woman struggling to understand the bewildering death of her lover.