"The Book of Illusions" by Paul Auster (Holt). The New York novelist's latest concerns a young, grieving widower who becomes obsessed with a silent film star who vanished in 1929 - and may still be alive.

"Summerland" by Michael Chabon (Talk Miramax). A story for all ages about a boy who lives on an island in Puget Sound, where it rains every day except where it never rains, and his unlikely mission to forestall the end of the world. "An American version of Middle Earth," right here in Puget Sound, by the author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay."

"Caramelo" by Sandra Cisneros (Knopf). The author of "The House on Mango Street" portrays a family of Mexican-American shawl-makers, in a novel set in Chicago, Mexico City and San Antonio.

"Skirt and the Fiddle" by Tristan Egolf (Grove). The author of "Lord of the Barnyard" follows up his splashy debut with a novel about a brilliant violinist who, after a catastrophic gig, gives up the music world for a flophouse populated by a smorgasbord of misfits.

"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author of "The Virgin Suicides" gets ambitious in his follow-up novel: a tale about a suburban hermaphrodite that spans eight decades.

"The Crimson Petal and the White" by Michael Faber (Harcourt). A massive (848 pages) historical novel, set in Victorian England, about a 19-year-old prostitute trying to better her lot in life. By the author of "Under the Skin."

"The Mulberry Empire" by Philip Hensher (Knopf). This British novelist ("Kitchen Venom") is a new name to us, but his novel's subject matter - the British Empire's catastrophic attempt to take possession of Afghanistan in 1839 - couldn't be more timely.

"Extravaganza" by Gary Krist (Broadway). Novel about two money-crazed cities "obsessed with the promise of new technologies": 1690s London and 1990s New York. By the author of "Bad Chemistry" and "The Garden State."

"The Human Country: New and Collected Stories" by Harry Matthews (Dalkey Archive). Short fiction by one of the livelier American experimental novelists ("Tlooth," "Cigarettes") writing today.

"In Revere, in Those Days" by Roland Merullo (Shaye Areheart). New novel by a writer whose memoir earlier this year, "Revere Beach Elegy," was already one of 2002's highlights. The new book is again set in the Boston blue-collar suburb where Merullo grew up.

"Family Matters" by Rohinton Mistry (Knopf). 1990s Bombay provides the setting for the Canadian writer's latest novel, in which an elderly patriarch's suffering from Parkinson's disease precipitates "a great unraveling, and repair of the family."

"What Harry Saw" by Thomas Moran (Riverhead). A novelist who specializes in characters under severe constraints when it comes to perceiving the reality around them ("The Man in the Box") tells the tale of a man who "sees only what he wants to see."

"Lullaby" by Chuck Palahniuk (Doubleday). From the man who gave you "Choke" and "Fight Club" comes ... "Lullaby"? Don't worry, Palahniuk hasn't gone soft: the plot concerns an African chant so powerful it "turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction."

"Roofwalker" by Susan Power (Milkweed). Second book, blending fiction and nonfiction, by a Sioux writer ("The Grass Dancer"), in which she portrays "both imaginary and real figures who live mostly away from the reservation yet palpably feel its influence and see its ghosts in their daily lives."

"The Drift" by John Ridley (Knopf). Novel about an African-American man who, after "living white," learns to live rough on the railroads of the West, where he becomes involved in the search for a 17-year-old girl who disappeared somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. By the novelist-screenwriter ("Stray Dogs," "Three Kings").

"Tourmaline" by Joanna Scott (Little, Brown). The PEN/Faulkner Award finalist ("Various Antidotes") sets her new novel on the island of Elba, where an American family's overseas experience is shadowed by Napoleonic and World War II history.

"After Nature" by W.G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell (Random House). A newly translated early work by the late German writer ("Austerlitz"), consisting of three biographical prose poems about painter Matthias Grunewald, explorer-botanist Georg Steller and Sebald himself.

"The Last Girls" by Lee Smith (Algonquin). Four women pay homage to a fifth woman's memory, as they scatter her ashes in the Mississippi, along the same route they took as college classmates 35 years earlier. By the popular Southern writer ("Saving Grace").

"In the Hand of Dante" by Nick Tosches (Little, Brown). The novelist-journalist ("The Devil and Sonny Liston") builds a novel around the discovery of the manuscript of "The Divine Comedy" in Dante's own hand.

"One Man's Bible" by Gao Xingjian, translated by Mabel Lee (HarperCollins). The new novel by the Chinese Nobel laureate ("Soul Mountain") is an autobiographical tale about an exiled Chinese writer journeying from France to Hong Kong for a production of one of his plays.

"Return to Painting" (Perennial) reproduces over 100 of the writer's Indian-ink-on-rice-paper artworks.

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"Chinese Whispers" by John Ashbery (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A new collection of 65 poems by the man Harold Bloom has called "America's greatest living poet."

"Nine Horses" by Billy Collins (Random House). A new collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States ("Sailing Alone Around the Room").

"The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Raw Footage" by Robert Coover (Grove). One of our boldest literary experimenters ("The Public Burning," "Briar Rose") creates a shapeshifting story about a character who's "part porn star, part clown" navigating his way through "a frozen meta-city."

"The Watchers" by Tahar Djaout (Ruminator Books). First English translation of the Algerian writer's 1991 novel, winner of France's Prix Méditerranée, is about an inventor who runs afoul of fundamentalism as he tries to obtain a patent for a new loom he designed. Djaout was assassinated by an Islamic fundamentalist group in 1993.

"Baudolino" by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver (Harcourt). The adventures of a peasant with a gift for learning languages and telling lies, set in early 13th-century Constantinople, Paris and other more exotic locales. By the author of "The Name of the Rose." .

"Agape Agape" by William Gaddis (Viking). The final (brief) novel from the National Book Award-winning author ("A Frolic of His Own") takes the form of a dying man's monologue as he fulminates about the social history of the player piano and the deterioration of civilization. Penguin is issuing a paperback original collection of Gaddis' nonfiction, "The Rush for Second Place."

"In the River Sweet" by Patricia Henley (Pantheon). A second novel by the author of "Hummingbird House" (a National Book Award nominee), about a Catholic mother who, just as she's learning to embrace her daughter's lesbianism, is brought face-to-face with a 30-year-old secret when her illegitimate son contacts her.

"The Crazed" by Ha Jin (Pantheon). The new novel by the National Book Award-winning author ("Waiting") portrays a Chinese professor whose ravings, after he suffers a stroke, may be a symptom of illness or "an outpouring of truth" about his politically troubled past.

"The Navigator of New York" by Wayne Johnston (Doubleday). Historical novel about a Newfoundlander recruited on an expedition competing with Robert Peary to be the first to reach the North Pole. By one of the more interesting Canadian writers to emerge in the last few years ("The Colony of Unrequited Dreams").

"Ignorance" by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins). Two exiles "pick up the thread of their strange love story" when they meet by chance while visiting their native Prague. By the Franco-Czech novelist ("The Unbearable Lightness of Being").

"The Miracle" by John L'Heureux (Atlantic Monthly). A novel, set in the 1970s, about a Catholic priest transferred from his diocese because of his "dangerous ideas on sex, marriage, and birth control." By the author of "A Woman Run Mad."

"Man About Town" by Mark Merlis (St. Martin's). New novel by the gay writer ("American Studies") about a middle-age guy who searches out the model for an underwear ad in a long-defunct magazine, after his lover dumps him for a younger man.

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," translated by W.S. Merwin (Knopf). A new verse translation, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, of one of the great masterpieces of medieval literature.

"The Scheme for Full Employment" by Magnus Mills (Picador USA). The new novel by the author of "Three to See the King" is an absurdist parable about a "gloriously self-perpetuating" trucking/warehousing employment scheme that winds up producing nothing.

"I'll Take You There" by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco). A young college girl of the early 1960s ("we were not women yet but girls") falls in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student in Oates' latest novel.

"July, July" by Tim O'Brien (Houghton Mifflin). Taking a 1969 Minnesota college class's 30th reunion as its starting point, the new novel by Tim O'Brien ("The Things They Carried") weaves diverse stories together as it addresses its characters' "many memories, many ghosts."

"Douglass' Women" by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Atria). Historical fiction by the African-American writer ("Voodoo Dreams," "Magic City"), about the two women in Frederick Douglass' life: his wife of 44 years, Anna, who helped him escape slavery, and his mistress, German-Jewish heiress Ottilie Assing.

"Tell Me: 30 Stories" by Mary Robison (Counterpoint). One of the more eccentric perpetrators of 1980s minimalist fiction ("Believe Them," "Oh!") has been enjoying a comeback lately, and this paperback-original selection of her early work - plus four new stories - should reintroduce her work to a new generation of readers.

"Great Dream of Heaven" by Sam Shepard (Knopf). Seventeen short stories by the playwright ("True West"). Shepard's most recent work for the stage, "The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, When the World Was Green: Three Plays," is also being published in a Vintage paperback original.

"Pictures from an Expedition" by Diane Smith (Viking). The winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Fiction Prize for "Letters from Yellowstone" sets her new novel in the badlands of Montana in 1876.

"The Autograph Man" by Zadie Smith (Random House). Perhaps the most eagerly awaited second novel this season. The author of "White Teeth" depicts an autograph dealer who goes to unusual lengths "to give people what they want: a little piece of Fame."

"The Story of Lucy Gault" by William Trevor (Viking). The much-praised Anglo-Irish writer ("Felicia's Journey") sets his latest novel in a politically tense 1920s Ireland, where a wealthy couple's plans to flee to England is undermined by their 9-year-old daughter's determination to stay.

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"The Stories of Alice Adams" (Knopf). All the short fiction of the Virginia-born San Francisco writer.

"The Collected Stories" by Clare Boylan (Counterpoint). Two decades of short fiction by an Irish writer who has been compared to Alice Munro, Alistair McLeod and William Trevor.

"Bet Your Life" by Richard Dooling (HarperCollins). The National Book Award nominee ("White Man's Grave") takes the death of a young insurance-fraud investigator as the starting point for his new novel, exploring "murder and the mysteries of the human soul."

"The Seven Sisters" by Margaret Drabble (Harcourt). A woman "betrayed, rejected, divorced, and alienated from her three grown daughters" opts to quit her beautiful rural home for a seedy flat in London. By the author of "The Witch of Exmoor."

"The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov," edited with an afterword by Paul A. Lacey (New Directions). An overview of the career of the British poet who spent her final years in Seattle. With a preface by Robert Creeley.

"Collected Poems" by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A definitive-looking, 800-page edition of the New England poet's complete verse.

"Balthasar's Odyssey" by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Barbara Bray (Arcade). It's 1665, and in the face of widespread fears of the imminent return of the Antichrist, a 17th-century antiquarian searches for a rare book that may put a different spin on things.

"The Cave" by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Harcourt). Mysterious goings-on in "an imposing complex of shops, apartment blocks, offices, and sensation zones" are at the heart of this new novel by the Portuguese Nobel laureate ("Blindness," "All the Names").

"The Winter Queen" by Jane Stevenson (Houghton Mifflin). One of the new bright stars of the British literary scene ("Several Deceptions," "London Bridges") tries her hand at historical fiction with a novel set in 17th-century Holland, about a clandestine affair between Elizabeth of Bohemia and an African prince.

"Silent Cruise" by Timothy Taylor (Counterpoint). A novella and short stories by the Canadian writer who made a notable fiction debut this past summer with "Stanley Park."

"Seek My Face" by John Updike (Knopf). A 79-year-old painter relives the various stages of her life and career in a single day when questioned by a New York interviewer.

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"Child of My Heart" by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The latest novel by the National Book Award winner ("Charming Billy") is narrated by a beautiful woman raised by her parents to marry into wealth, who also happens - at age 14 - to be her Long Island town's most sought-after baby-sitter.

"The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis" by Vassilis Vassilikos, translated by Karen Emmerich (Seven Stories). First U.S. publication of a 1978 novel by the Greek writer ("Z"), said to be one of his pivotal works. It concerns a biographer's investigation into the life and works of a "highly mysterious" Greek writer.

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