https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Fall-books-preview-3197534.php
Oscar Villalon Chronicle Book Editor
Published 4:00 am PDT, Sunday, August 31, 2008
Fall Book Preview
"2666."
Bay Area readers, remember those numbers.
7-9, 7-9, 6-6 and 8-4.
Niners, Raiders, Stanford and Cal fans, respectively, you should hope for those numbers.
Roberto Bolaño's swan song, "2666," won't have much competition as the most eagerly anticipated novel this fall. The late prize-winning Spanish author (by way of Mexico by way of Chile) wrote it with his family's future in mind: He was dying of cancer and wanted to leave them with work they could publish after his death. With last year's critical success of Natasha Wimmer's English translation of "The Savage Detectives," a hunger has been stoked among serious readers for more of the sexy, horrific, erudite and humorous world spinning in Bolaño's fiction.
Among football fans in these parts, different sorts of appetites have been whetted, based on last fall's performances. Jim Harbaugh can prove this year that he's for real, meaning getting Stanford to bowl eligibility. Jeff Tedford can redeem the Bears' epic meltdown by surprising everybody with a solid offense and stingy defense. And Mike Nolan and Lane Kiffin are looking to keep their jobs by keeping their teams within .500.
Neither "2666" nor proud seasons will materialize till November. So here's how to handle the time between now and then.
September is loaded with goodness. From Philip Roth's new novel, in which the Korean War and college life prefigure, to Marilynne Robinson's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Gilead," there's fiction from heavy hitters, as well as interesting memoirs from Elizabeth McCracken and Michael Greenberg. It's also the month the Niners must get a win against Arizona and Detroit at home (and Seattle on the road would be nice, but let's not count on that) to keep them from heading out of October at an all-too-possible 0-8. Same goes for the Raiders. Beating vulnerable Denver, Kansas City and Baltimore teams will go a long way toward avoiding ignominy before Halloween.
October offers new books from literary stalwarts such as Diane Johnson, John Updike, Walter Mosley and John Barthes, as well as Amitav Ghosh's intriguing novel about a ship and her crew entangled in the Opium Wars of China. And Cal hosts Arizona State on Oct. 4, by which time it's not unreasonable to think the Bears could be 4-0. With the ranked Sun Devils expected to challenge USC for the Pac-1o championship, a win here at Memorial will catch a lot of people's attention, namely the Trojans'. Meanwhile, Stanford has a big game against Notre Dame that same Saturday and might well come into South Bend with a 2-3 record. Beat the Irish, and you're 3-3, with games remaining against Arizona and Washington State at home. Those are winnable.
That leaves just away games at Oregon and Cal, and SC at home, all in November. They beat both SC and Cal last year. Who knows what shape Oregon will be in by then? All they have to do is just beat one of them, and the Cardinal could be playing in Las Vegas in December. Which, if you're diligent, should be plenty of time to have finished Bolaño's masterpiece, or any of the other books listed below - a sampling of some of the more compelling titles coming out in the fall.
September fiction
Jeffrey Renard Allen's story collection, Holding Pattern (Graywolf); Philip Roth's novel, Indignation (Houghton Mifflin); John Berger's novel, From A to X: A Story in Letters (Verso); Marilynne Robinson's novel Home (FSG).
Carlos Fuentes' story collection, Happy Families (Random House); acclaimed journalist Ian Buruma's first novel, The China Lover (The Penguin Press); Francine Prose's novel, Goldengrove (Harper); Curtis Sittenfeld's novel, American Wife (Random House).
Russian author Victor Pelevin's novel, translated by Andrew Bromfield, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Viking); Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's novel, Ms. Hempel Chronicle (Harcourt); Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright's novel, Yesterday's Weather (Grove); Nadeem Aslam's novel, The Wasted Vigil (Knopf).
Hannah Tinti's novel, The Good Thief (Dial Press); Annie Proulx's further exploration of Wyoming in her story collection, Fine Just the Way It Is (Scribner); Antonio Lobo Antunes' novel, translated by Gregory Rabassa, What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? (Norton).
Matthew Quick's first novel, The Silver Lining Playbook (FSG); essayist Phillip Lopate's Two Marriages: Novellas (Other Press); former Merry Prankster Ed McClanahan's book of short stories, O the Clear Moment (Counterpoint); Nu Nu Yi's novel, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, Smile as They Bow (Hyperion), short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize.
September nonfiction
Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (The Penguin Press); Charles Bukowski's Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 (City Lights); David Harris' The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty (Random House).
Rick Wartzman's Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (PublicAffairs); David Thomson's Have You Seen ...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf); Bob Woodward's The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 (Simon & Schuster).
Novelist Elizabeth McCracken's memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (Little, Brown); Stanford's Lawrence Lessig's Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (The Penguin Press); Kathleen Burk's Old World, New World: Great Britain and America From the Beginning (Atlantic); Kathleen Norris' Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life (Riverhead).
Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton); the Nation's sportswriter Dave Zirin's A People's History of Sports in the United States (the New Press); NPR's Tom Gjelten's Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (Viking); Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir (Other Press).
John Diamond's The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence From the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq (Stanford); Peter Doggett's There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the '60s (Canon); Don Thompson's The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (Palgrave).
Julian Barnes' meditation on death, Nothing to be Afraid Of (Knopf); The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (DaCapo), edited by Bill Morgan; Asian Americans in the Twenty-First Century: Oral Histories (The New Press), edited by Joan Faung Jean Lee; filmmaker Alex Cox's memoir, X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull Press).
Harper's magazine Publisher John R. MacArthur's You Can't Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America (Melville House); French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy's Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (Random House); Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin).
James Bamford's The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (Doubleday); Matt Birkbeck's Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob (Amistad).
Kim Barnes' novel, A Country Called Home (Knopf); crime writer Dennis Lehane's historical novel, The Given Day (Morrow); Nancy Huston's novel, Fault Lines (Black Cat); Julia Glass' novel, I See You Everywhere (Pantheon).
John Updike's sequel, The Widows of Eastwick (Knopf); Amitav Ghosh's novel, Sea of Poppies (FSG); Walter Mosley's novel, The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow (Basic); Gioia Timpanelli's novel, What Makes a Child Lucky (Norton).
Diane Johnson's novel, Lulu in Marrakech (Dutton); Jim Harrison's novel, The English Major (Grove); Jonathan Carroll's novel, The Ghost in Love (FSG); NPR book commentator Alan Cheuse's novel, To Catch the Lightning (Sourcebooks); John Barthes' The Development (Houghton Mifflin).
German author Ingo Schulze's novel, translated by John E. Woods, New Lives (Knopf); Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights); San Francisco writer Kirsten Menger-Anderson's novel, Doctor Olaf Van Schuler's Brain (Algonquin).
October nonfiction
Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead); Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford); Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls: From a Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau); Berkeley composer John Adams' Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (FSG).
Art Spiegelman's Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! (Pantheon); Spain Rodriguez's Che: A Graphic Biography (Verso); Hooman Majd's The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran (Doubleday); the late Ryszard Kapuscinski's meditation on how the West views non-Europeans and non-Americans, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Other (Verso).
Terry Tempest Williams' Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon); vampire novelist Anne Rice's Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Knopf); Charles D. Ellis' The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (The Penguin Press); Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (Metropolitan).
Alex Perry's Falling Off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization (Bloomsbury Press); documentarian Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of War: And How It Lost Its Way (Free Press); James Orbinski's An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action for the Twenty-First Century (Walker).
Jackie Wullschlager's Chagall: A Biography (Knopf); John Demos' The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World (Viking); Harold S. Luft's Total Cure: The Antidote to the Health Care Crisis (Harvard).
Ariela J. Gross' What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard); Robert Goodwin's Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South (Harper); Robert Roper's Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War (Bloomsbury).
Hank Cardello with Doug Garr's Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat (Ecco); Tilar J. Mazzeo's The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (Collins).
Roberto Bolaño's book of poetry, translated by Laura Healy, The Romantic Dogs (New Directions); Bolaño's final novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer, 2666 (FSG).
Yasutaka Tsutsui's story collection, translated by Andrew Driver, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Pantheon); Jose Saramago's novel, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Death With Interruptions (Harcourt); Stewart O'Nan's novel, Songs for the Missing (Viking).
Sylvia Brownrigg's novel, The Delivery Room (Counterpoint); Eileen Myles' The Inferno: A Poet's Novel (Soft Skull Press); Toni Morrison's novel, A Mercy (Knopf).
William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac's And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove); Stephen King's story collection, Just After Sunset (Scribner).
November nonfiction
Clyde A. Milner II and Carol A. O'Connor's As Big As the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart (Oxford); Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Random House).
Patrick French's The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf); "Reading Lolita in Tehran" author Azar Nafisi's Things I've Been Silent About: A Memoir (Random House).
H.W. Brands' Traitor to His Class: The Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Doubleday); Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism (Riverhead).
Stefan Kanfer's Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando (Knopf); Karl Jacoby's Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (The Penguin Press); Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras (Pantheon), edited by Robert Gottlieb.
Daniel L. Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Pantheon); Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller's Lili Marlene: The Soldiers' Song of World War II (Norton); Steve Fainaru's Big Boy Rules: In the Company of America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq (Da Capo).
Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (the Penguin Press); Michael Lewis' Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity (Norton); Above All: Mount Whitney and California's Highest Peaks (Heyday Books), by Steve Roper, photographs by David Stark Wilson; Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't (Little, Brown).