Books to Watch Out For: September: The New Yorker Among the big works of literary fiction coming out this month is Jonathan Lethem's new novel, "Dissident Gardens" (Doubleday, out September 10th). Set in New York City and spanning from the nineteen-thirties to the present day, it follows a mother-daughter pair - Rose Zimmer, a fierce radical nicknamed the Red Queen of Sunnyside, and her daughter, Miriam, who migrates from Queens to Greenwich Village - and their left-wing milieu. An excerpt from the book was published in The New Yorker in May. "Subtle Bodies" (Knopf, out September 10th), Norman Rush's third novel, is his first book to be set entirely outside of Africa. A slimmer and more understated work than his previous novels, "Mating" (1991) and "Mortals" (2003), it tells the story of Ned and Nina, a married couple who travel to an estate in the Catskills to attend the funeral of Ned's college friend, Douglas, twenty-plus years after graduation. You can read the first page of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, "Bleeding Edge" (Penguin Press, out September 17th), online, but other than that it is shrouded in the usual secrecy. The publisher describes it as "a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet," centered upon an Upper West Sider named Maxine Tarnow who gets mixed up with a host of Pynchonian shysters and loons after she begins investigating the finances of a computer-security firm. Out at the end of the month is Jhumpa Lahiri's second novel, "The Lowland" (Knopf, out September 24th). Set in both India and America, it follows two brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, born fifteen months apart in Calcutta during the Second World War, whose lives take radically different courses. (An excerpt ran in the magazine's summer fiction issue, in June.) - R. A. "The Childhood of Jesus," by J. M. Coetzee (Viking), out September 3rd. Coetzee's new novel takes us to a surreal land where the main characters - an orphaned boy named David and his self-appointed caretaker, Simón - wash up in a boat full of refugees. Coetzee's language is stark, consisting mostly of dialogue as David and Simón start a life from scratch. They are without any possessions, relationships, or even memories from their previous lives, and they have to build a language to function as they learn to survive within the bounds of the faceless bureaucracy that rules their new home. Simón strives to make a place for them within the society, but when David runs afoul of the authorities in his school, Simón must make a final choice between assimilation and escape. - A. D. "The Story of a New Name," by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions), out September 3rd. James Wood wrote about Ferrante in the magazine earlier this year, calling her novels "intensely, violently personal." The second installment of Ferrante's trilogy, which began with "My Brilliant Friend," continues the exacting portrayal of the friendship of Lila and Elena. The women are now in their twenties. The spectacularly talented Lila has married her way out of poverty, but feels stifled by her marriage. Elena continues to try to discover her own way in life, pursuing her intellectual development. Their relationship is intense and complicated, characterized by both love and resentment, as Ferrante's multifaceted characters grow along with, and away from, each other. - A. D. "Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal," by Abigail Carroll (Basic Books), out September 10th. Why do I always eat cereal in the morning? Why do we say grace at dinner but not at lunch or breakfast? Why do we condemn, or at least scorn, snacking? These are a few of the questions that the author and food historian Abigail Carroll set out to answer when she began her investigation into the history of the American meal and the popular assumptions that underlie where, when, and how we eat. She traces the birth of modern eating habits to the Industrial Revolution, examines past and present attitudes toward snacking, and assesses the current state of the American meal and efforts to reform it. - R. A. "John Updike: The Collected Stories," edited by Christopher Carduff (Library of America), out September 12th. This two-volume set from Library of America gathers a hundred and eighty-six of Updike's short stories, many of them first published in The New Yorker in the course of Updike's nearly sixty-year-long relationship with the magazine. Arranged in chronological order, the collection begins with "Ace in the Hole" (1953), about a Rabbit-like former high-school basketball star, which Updike wrote as a Harvard senior, and ends with "The Full Glass" (2008), featuring the reminiscences of a septuagenarian, published the year before Updike's death. (The Henry Bech and Maples stories and the Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans series have been reserved for future L.O.A. collections.) - R. A. "Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One," by Kevin Jackson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), out September 17th. Ezra Pound once proposed that the modern era began on October 20, 1921, the day that James Joyce finished writing "Ulysses." There have been many attempts to identify the precise moment when everything changed and the old world passed away: Virginia Woolf said it was in 1910; D. H. Lawrence suggested 1915. Jackson has chosen 1922 as a year that encapsulates many of the cultural, technological, and historical shifts that define the modern world. "Ulysses" and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" were both published that year; Proust died, the Ottoman Empire dissolved, and Charlie Chaplin rose to fame. With a month-by-month account of births, deaths, and events in 1922, Jackson has written a "biography of a year." - A. D. "O My America!: Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World," by Sara Wheeler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), out September 24th. "Role models are scarce for women contemplating a second act," writes Wheeler in the introduction to her new book. Approaching her fiftieth birthday ("Ahead of me the Frumpy Years stretched out like a downhill catwalk"), the veteran travel writer found some in six middle-aged English women from the Victorian era who embarked on their own second acts by going to America. Biographical sketches of historical figures like Fanny Trollope (the mother of Anthony), who was forty-nine when she began the journey that led to her best-selling book "Domestic Manners of the Americans," and Fanny Kemble, whose marriage to a slave owner prompted her to become an outspoken proponent of the abolitionist movement, are combined with stories from Wheeler's own travels through America while researching these extraordinary women. - A. D. "Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s," edited by David Rieff (Library of America), out September 26th. Susan Sontag considered her fictional works her most important achievements, but it was her passionate, polemical essays of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies that made her famous as a public intellectual. This volume, edited by Sontag's son, David Rieff, collects four of Sontag's most influential books from that period: "Against Interpretation" (1966), in which she famously called for "an erotics of art"; "Styles of Radical Will" (1969), a collection of essays on film, literature, politics, and pornography; "On Photography" (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977; and "Illness as Metaphor" (1978), Sontag's critique of the symbolic language often used to describe disease. Also included in this volume are six of Sontag's previously uncollected essays. - R. A.