This fall literary offerings are coming in all shapes and sizes with many promising releases to ease us through the chill of autumn.
Some of the more highly anticipated are a new Thomas Pynchon epic, "Against the Day," Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones' collection of stories, "All Aunt Hagar's Children," Richard Ford's "The Lay of the Land" and Charles Frazier's "Thirteen Moons." The latter is set before the Civil War primarily in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains. In "Brothers," by Da Chen, two brothers born of a powerful general and different mothers during the roiling years of the Cultural Revolution, fall in love with the same woman.
Other works include Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," Alice McDermott's "After This," William Boyd's "Restless," Margaret Atwood's "Moral Disorder," Alice Munro's "The View from Castle Rock" and Edna O'Brien's "The Light of Evening."
Intellectual thrillers include George Pelicanos' "The Night Gardener," John le Carre's "The Mission Song," Michael Cox's "The Meaning of Night," Jed Rubenfeld's "The Interpretation of Murder," and Stephen King's "Lisey." As well, there are new tomes by Patricia Cornwell, Brad Meltzer, Walter Mosley and Mitch Albom.
But the hottest new book soon to be on the shelf is Pynchon's "Against the Day." The author has carefully avoided contact with journalists for more than 40 years, making the publication of a new book an event. Anything to do with the new book has been hard to come by. But surprising and befuddling many, Pynchon posted a synopsis of the book in July on Amazon. Below is an excerpt:
"Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris and silent-era Hollywood.
"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. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
"The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx ... Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck."
Good luck was something the last Queen of France had, but lost. Another take on the Marie Antoinette phenomena adds to the new understanding of the queen.
"Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette," by Sena Jeter Naslund, takes the same route as Antonia Fraser's "Marie Antoinette: The Journey," only this tale is related in first person. Using the same available research as Fraser, whose book was a fact-filled biography, this book is a kind of companion book with dialogue.
"Abundance" reveals a woman who was taught to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" by her formidable Austrian mother, the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. She tried to follow suit but was not always comfortable with the formality at the court. As depicted in her own letters to her sisters and mother, she always considered herself apart from the privileged royals of the court.
Fate plays a large part in the trials of our old friend, Frank Bascombe, in Richard Ford's third installment of the life of an ordinary American, "Lay of the Land."
Begun in "The Sportswriter," Ford's cycle of novels continued with "Independence Day," which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Now in his 50s, Bascombe is awaiting what he terms the Permanent Period, where all that was dreamed of once is now accomplished and one is simply here, in this moment.
And finally there is "The End" by Lemony Snicket. Again, amazingly, the author posted a comment about his book on Amazon. This may become quite the trend. Snicket is equally as elusive as Pynchon, but from a different planet altogether, although in Snicket's fabulous books, contrary-to-the-fact occurrences are also common. Here, then, is his letter.
"Dear Reader,
"You are presumably looking at the back of this book, or the end of the end. The end of the end is the best place to begin the end, because if you read the end from the beginning of the beginning of the end to the end of the end of the end, you will arrive at the end of the end of your rope.
"This book is the last in "A Series of Unfortunate Events," and even if you braved the previous 12 volumes, you probably can't stand such unpleasantries as a fearsome storm, a suspicious beverage, a herd of wild sheep, an enormous bird cage, and a truly haunting secret about the Baudelaire parents.
"It has been my solemn occupation to complete the history of the Baudelaire orphans, and at last I am finished. You likely have some other occupation, so if I were you I would drop this book at once, so the end does not finish you."
"Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antionette?
by Sena Jeter Naslund. William Marrow. $26.95. 560 pp.
