The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

Spring and fall are the big seasons for publishers, the time to bring out their heavy guns — especially fall, with the December holiday shopping season dawning.

The view from here, aided by advance copies, publishers’ announcements and advance reviews in professional journals, is that these are the titles that will get (or at least deserve) the most attention this season:

Fiction

PONTOON, by Garrison Keillor. If you can resist the sophisticated folksiness of Keillor’s NPR show, A Prairie Home Companion — and a few otherwise intelligent people find it entirely resistible — you’ll probably be able to resist this latest Lake Wobegon saga. The rest of us won’t try. (Sept.)

TREE OF SMOKE, by Denis Johnson (FSG). There may never be a Vietnam War novel to end all Vietnam War novels, but this one is said to come about as close to a definitive fictional telling as you can get. (Sept.)

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, by Junot Diaz. A kaleidoscope of languages, cultures, personal and national histories, Diaz’s complex first novel mirrors the confusions, fears and triumphs of the immigrant experience. (Sept.)

AN ARSONIST’S GUIDE TO WRITERS’ HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND, by Brock Clarke (Algonquin). Okay, it was the title that got my attention. But Publisher’s Weekly called it “A multilayered, flame-filled adventure about literature, lies, love and life” in its starred review. (Sept.)

NOW AND FOREVER, by Ray Bradbury (Morrow). An appropriate title for the latest collection of the venerated master of fantasy and science fiction, who has been writing almost forever — Martian Chronicles was published in 1950 — not with a computer (“I don’t do Windows,” he said once), but with a magic pen, dipped in the Fountain of Youth. (Sept.)

THE HEADMASTER’S DILEMMA, by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin). Auchincloss, one of our greatest prose stylists, will turn 90 this fall — which makes him three years older than Bradbury. Known as a writer’s writer (one reviewer called him “a modern-day Henry James”), he inhabits society’s upper crust in person, and practically owns it in his fiction. This one deals with scandal at an exclusive prep school — a return to the world of his best-selling book, The Rector of Justin.

BRIDGE OF SIGHS, by Richard Russo (Knopf). Russo’s trademark examination of life in a decaying manufacturing town in the northeast brings us sad, vividly rendered and unforgettable characters. (Oct.)

THE AIR WE BREATHE, by Andrea Barrett (Norton). Readers of Barrett’s National Book Award-winning collection of stories, Ship Fever (1996), and her Pulitzer Prize finalist, Servants of the Map, will welcome the reappearance of familiar characters in this story of a tuberculosis ward in 1916. (Oct.)

NOW & THEN, by Robert B. Parker (Putnam). This is Parker’s 35th Spencer yarn, a franchise that shows no sign of flagging. Expect snappy action and snappier dialogue — especially between the Boston PI and his main squeeze Susan. (Oct.)

BLONDE FAITH, by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown). Mosley’s 10th Easy Rawlins thriller takes him on a new route through familiar, but always exciting, territory. (Oct.)

WRITTEN IN BONE, by Simon Beckett (Delacorte). Advance reviews suggest this second outing for forensic anthropologist David Hunter is even better than last year’s first, The Chemistry of Death. (Oct.)

THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER, by Tom Perrotta (St. Martin’s). Culture war breaks out in Stonewood Heights after the local high school’s sex ed. teacher tells her students oral sex can be fun. (Oct.)

BREAKFAST WITH BUDDHA, by Roland Merullo (Algonquin). Fate unites a respectable suburbanite husband and father with a New Age guru in a car trip across Middle America, with comic and sometimes affecting results. (Oct.)

A FREE LIFE, by Ha Jin (Pantheon). Ha Jin fled China for America after Tiananmen Square and won the National Book Award in 1999. This novel, set in suburban Atlanta, suggests he finds the trivialities of American life as tyrannical in their own way as the repression of his former country. (Nov.)

Nonfiction

Our current fascination with our Founding Fathers continues . . .

FOR LIBERTY AND GLORY: Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions, by James R. Gaines (Norton). Historians will look for new insights on Franco-American history, the rest of us for Gaines’ lyrical prose and fascinating details. This book should reward both. (Sept.)

SO HELP ME GOD: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State, by Forrest Church (Harcourt). Church demonstrates that the issues of religion and government were just as vexing then as now. (Sept.)

AMERICAN CREATION: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf). Early reviews say Ellis, who won the Pulitzer for his earlier book on the founders (Founding Brothers), has exceeded his own high standard as historian and master of the kind of gripping narrative and telling detail that guarantee a wide readership. (Oct.)

NEVER GIVE UP: My Stroke, My Recovery and My Return to the NFL, by Tedy Bruschi with Michael Holley (Wiley). The title says it all for Patriots fans. (Sept.)

COMMODORE: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by Edward J. Renehan Jr. (Basic Books). Rhode Islander Renehan, a frequent Journal book reviewer, sheds new and unflattering light on America’s iconic tycoon — “a hard-drinking egotist and whoremonger devoid of manners or charity,” according to the publisher’s announcement, who was plagued by advanced syphilis in his final years. (Oct.)

DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike (Knopf). If any other prolific and wide-ranging writer had dared gather every single nonfiction magazine piece, speech, blurb, review and introduction he had written in the past eight years into a single volume, one would expect at least a few clunkers. Updike seems incapable of such. It may be his only limitation. (Oct.)

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin (Doubleday). New Yorker writer Toobin’s absorbing group portrait reveals a Court whose decisions have less to do with persuasive argument and the law than the individual justices’ quirky personalities and political passions. (Sept.)

THE COLDEST WINTER, by David Halberstam (Hyperion). A tall man who bestrode contemporary journalism like a Colossus, Halberstam was struck down in an auto accident this year at a vigorous 71. We are left with his last book, which he regarded as among his best, a history of the Korean War with a new villain: none other than Gen. Douglas MacArthur. (Sept.)

CAN’T BUY ME LOVE: The Beatles, Britain, and America, by Jonathan Gould (Harmony). A new biography with the gossip turned down and the music up. (Oct.)

MY DEAREST FRIEND: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor, with a foreword by Joseph J. Ellis (Harvard/Belknap). American historians’ favorite letter-writers may become yours as well. (Oct.)

THE JOURNALS OF JOYCE CAROL OATES, 1973-1982, edited by Greg Johnson. Our most obsessive — dare we say driven? — writer of feverish psychological fiction puts herself on the couch for an unsparing, at times almost brutal, examination. (Oct.)

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A Biography, by David Michaelis (Harper). The creator of the comic strip that brought us so much innocent fun turns out to have been plagued by depression and melancholy, some of it hinted at in his cartoons. In one sequence, Snoopy’s crush on a female dog is revealed as a retelling of Schulz’s extramarital affair. (Oct.)

CLASSICS FOR PLEASURE, by Michael Dirda (Harcourt). Dirda, a Pulitzer-winning critic for the Washington Post, has all the qualifications to bring us a “great books” list, and none of the pretensions that often attend such exercises. You may catch yourself reading him, and even some of his suggestions, just for the fun of it. (Nov.)

Afterword

Favorite title of the year (so far):

EVIL GENES: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, by Barbara Oakley (Prometheus).

driggs@projo.com