Fall Preview

For Love of Politics, by Sally Bedell Smith (Random House, Oct.). The marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton survives by dint of their mutual ambitions.

A Global Life, by James D. Wolfensohn (PublicAffairs, Feb.). From Wall Street to the World Bank, with troubles and triumphs along the way.

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, by John Richardson (Knopf, Nov.). A much-awaited third volume.

My Grandfather's Son, by Clarence Thomas (Harper, Oct.). His father left him when he was 1, but he rose from hunger in rural Georgia to a seat on the Supreme Court.

Nureyev, by Julie Kavanagh (Pantheon, Oct.). The Russian superstar who reinvented ballet.

One Drop, by Bliss Broyard (Little, Brown, Sept.). As he lay dying of cancer, a celebrated literary critic told his WASP-y, privileged children that he was black.

Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis (HarperCollins, Oct.). From modest Midwestern roots to the heart of the American imagination.

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, by Janet Malcolm (Yale, Sept.). The fiery author of The Journalist and the Murderer, on a 40-year "marriage."

Why Women Should Rule the World, by Dee Dee Myers (Harper, Feb.). Bill Clinton's press secretary talks up her muscle in Washington's corridors of power.

Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf, Oct.). A callow poet and trained priest, this rebel sought to change the world.

Business and the Economy

The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economists, by Jonathan Chait (Houghton, Sept.). And the bad news is that they're still here.

Creating a World Without Poverty, by Muhammad Yunus (PublicAffairs, Jan.). The Nobel Prize winner argues for a free market with heart.

The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan, Sept.). Capitalist opportunists have exploited terrible disaster -- e.g., Katrina, the Asian tsunami -- to make themselves rich.

Superclass, by David Rothkopf (FSG, March). A hard look at the powerful business leaders of our time and how their ambitions shape lives.

Letters and Essays

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (Penguin, Nov.). Annotated and previously unpublished, this promises to be a literary milestone.

Due Considerations, by John Updike (Knopf, Oct.). Essays and criticism by one of America's great living writers.

Other Colors, by Orhan Pamuk (Knopf, Sept.). Last year's Nobel Prize winner gathers up his essays, throws in a story and illustrates them with his own hand.

Fiction

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta (St. Martin's, Oct.). Sex Ed meets evangelism in this satire by the author of Little Children.

The Air We Breathe, by Andrea Barrett (Norton, Oct.). It is fall, 1916, and America is considering going to war, but among tuberculosis patients in the Adirondacks, time stands still.

The Almost Moon, by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown, Oct.). It begins: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa (FSG, Oct.). One of the great figures of Latin American letters gives us a picaresque story of doomed love.

Breakfast With Buddha, by Roland Merullo (, Oct.). An all-American publishing executive finds himself on the road with a Mongolian monk.

Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo (Knopf, Oct.). The 60-year-old inheritor of an upstate New York convenience-store chain tries to untangle mysteries in his past.

Dreamsongs: Vol. I and Vol. II, by George R.R. Martin (Spectra, Oct. and Nov., respectively). Two volumes of stories, novellas, plays and commentary by a master of fantasy.

The Elephanta Suite, by Paul Theroux (Houghton, Sept.). Three novellas about travelers forever altered by India.

Eureka, by Jim Lehrer (RH, Oct.). A bored insurance executive tries to recapture his youth, with comic results.

Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth (Houghton, Oct.). Roth's final Zuckerman novel has Nathan at 71, with an embarrassing prostate problem. And yet sex is still very much on his mind.

The Fall of Troy, by Peter Ackroyd (Talese, Nov.). A celebrated German archaeologist digs down to the ancient ruins of Troy but cannot fathom his own marriage.

A Free Life, by Ha Jin (Pantheon, Nov.). The author of Waiting and War Trash now focuses his storytelling skills on America.

Ghost, by Alan Lightman (Pantheon, Oct.). An out-of-work banker takes a job in a mortuary and changes his view of life on Earth.

Lush Life, by Richard Price (FSG, March). From the author of Clockers, a story about men caught in the grind of urban reality.

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking, Jan.) By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, a novel about Jews in Spain during the late Middle Ages.

The Quiet Girl, by Peter Hoeg (FSG, Nov.). The author of Smilla's Sense of Snow returns with this story about a clown in a nunnery, sent out to bring back a missing child.

The Race, by Richard North Patterson (Holt, Oct.). A Republican candidate for president learns all too starkly that he can't hide a terrible mistake in his past.

Run, by Ann Patchett (Harper, Sept.). A man and his two adopted sons step out of a lecture hall into the Boston night and meet with a transforming act of violence.

Songs Without Words, by Ann Packer (Knopf, Sept.). Liz and Sarabeth's friendship is close until tragedy strikes and threatens to end all understanding.

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, by Gail Tsukiyama (St. Martin's, Sept.). Two orphan brothers in Japan survive war and forge their separate ways in a fractured country.

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (FSG, Sept.). The story of three young Americans who drift into the Vietnam war and out onto the ragged edge of sanity.

Trespass, by Valerie Martin (Doubleday, Sept.). When her son brings home a Croatian girlfriend, Chloe's life takes a wrenching turn into suspicion and downright fear.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. A highly anticipated new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf, Oct.); and a translation of Tolstoy's original version by Andrew Bromfield (Ecco, Sept.).

Mysteries and Thrillers

Blonde Faith, by Walter Mosley (LB, Oct.). No. 10 in Mosley's Easy Rawlins series, like a few others, involves love, murder and a woman with a dubious past.

Kennedy's Brain, by Henning Mankell (New Press, Sept.). In his latest opus, the Swedish master of the mysterious art takes his inspiration from the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Lady Killer, by Lisa Scottoline (Harper, Feb.). Here comes Scottoline's 15th murderer, but that's all her publisher will say.

The Reserve, by Russell Banks (Harper, Feb.). An unexpected entry in the suspense sweepstakes, this tale of money and ambition set in the late 1930s is by the celebrated author of Cloudsplitter and The Darling.

Stone Cold, by David Baldacci (Grand Central, Nov.). Oliver Stone and his Camel Club are up against a wily new opponent: a cold killer passing himself off as a family man.

T Is for Trespass, by Sue Grafton (Putnam, Dec.). A murderous sociopath steals the identity of a mild-mannered caregiver, and Kinsey Millhone fights time to save lives.

Poetry

Gulf Music, by Robert Pinsky (FSG, Oct.). By Book World's very own columnist, his first book of poetry since Jersey Rain.

Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco, Oct.). Not since Sun Under Wood (1996) have we seen his latest poetry, but Hass is always worth the wait.

To a Nightingale : Sonnets and Poems from Sappho to Borges, edited by Edward Hirsch (Braziller, Sept.). Thirty master poets join in this paean to the sweet-throated bird.

Windcatcher, by Breyten Breytenbach (Harcourt, Nov.). Verses from his exile in New York join his verses from a South African prison, making this the most complete volume by the great Afrikaner poet.

Marie Arana is the editor of Book World. Her novel, "Cellophane," was released in paperback in June.