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That '70s show and more
Fall books defy disaster
BY JOHN FREEMAN

This has been a pestilential year: floods, fires, bombings, plane crashes, a tsunami that killed almost a quarter of a million people, and America's worst natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina. It would seem, then, that Mother Nature and our own bad selves have trumped the ability to imagine anything bigger or worse. This coming fall and winter are thin on fiction (there are a few titles worth mentioning) but large on hulking works of non-fiction that might help us catch up with this runaway bobsled called planet Earth.

FICTION
It's been more than a decade since GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ published new fiction, and those looking for an epic might be a little disappointed by his slim novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Knopf, October 25), which Márquez wrote after surviving treatment for lymphatic cancer (now in remission) and which his publisher is delicately pushing without looking like a pimp. But if you're ready for steamy rumination on sex by a 90-year-old man who falls in love with the 14-year-old virgin he buys for himself on his birthday, well, this is your book.

The rest of the fall occasionally feels like a throwback to the '70s. ROBERT COOVER is publishing a nifty new collection of short stories called A Child Again (McSweeney's, October 1) that has all the occult magic of bedtime tales gone awry. JOYCE CAROL OATES is bringing out a new novel, Missing Mom (Ecco, October 4), that apparently is the kind of book her mother would have liked.

British novelist CHRISTOPHER WILSON returns after a long absence to tell the story of a black boy born white-skinned in Eureka, Mississippi, in 1950 with Cotton (Harcourt, October 5). If you think that conceit sounds contrived, settle in a little more comfortably to ANITA SHREVE's tried-and-true college reunion story, A Wedding in December (Little, Brown, October 10), in which seven former school mates get together for a nuptial celebration in the Berkshires. New Orleans's favorite novelist daughter, ANNE RICE, has a new one, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf, November 1), that's based on the Gospels and appears to be begging for Mel Gibson's cinematic attention.

Finally, the sleeper of the season might be JOANNA SCOTT's latest novel, Liberation (Little, Brown, November 8), in which a woman remembers her girlhood during World War II on the island of Elba, where she sheltered a soldier who needed refuge.

NON-FICTION
FRANK McCOURT may have kicked off the memoir boom in a big way, but you'll probably forgive him after reading his sure-to-be-a-blockbuster new one, Teacher Man (Scribner, November 15), which describes how teaching saved his life. In fact, his transformation from a meatpacking boozer to a Staten Island high-school teacher is more dramatic than his second evolution, 35 years later, into a walking epitome of the Irish can-do spirit.

JOAN DIDION's The Year of Magical Thinking, (Knopf, October 4) might be a smaller book, but it packs an even greater wallop. In typical Didion-like remove, it describes the year during which her daughter fell ill, her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne, suffered a fatal massive coronary in response, and she learned how to grieve while taking care of her own flesh and blood.

After heavy stuff like that, one might need a few laughs - and funny guy JOHN HODGMAN could fill a St. Bernard's thermos with the ones he serves up in his own bizarre almanac, My Areas of Expertise (Dutton, October 1), which includes everything from fun facts about hobos to lists of the world's worst haircuts. GEOFF DYER has taken a break from the first-person striptease for a new book on photography, The Ongoing Moment (Pantheon, October 11), which proves he can write about whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and still deserve our gratitude.

HAROLD BLOOM continues to cut a wide swath through Western civilization with Jesus and Yahweh (Riverhead, October 6). Novelist RAFI ZABOR delves into his own complicated character in his fabulous I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 12), a colorfully crafted memoir, the first of a projected four volumes.

America likes to see itself as the home of bigger-than-life characters. Few presidents deserved their big cock walk more than Andrew Jackson, the first commoner - born poor rather than as landed gentry - to achieve the presidency, and he's the hero of H.W. BRAND's admiring new biography, Andrew Jackson: A Life (Doubleday, October 18). If Jackson were president today, perhaps he'd have got us into the same mess in Iraq, which GEORGE PACKER puts under the microscope in The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (FSG, October 15).

Around this time, it's easy to wish for a consummate political leader. DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN makes a compelling case for Abraham Lincoln in her magisterial Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, November 1), in which the Great Emancipator emerges as the original Slick Willy as well.

Had Abe survived, the country might have escaped the fate described in Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (Knopf, November 4), in which Pulitzer-winning historian ERIC FONER shows how blacks founded new communities and churches and made good use of the land even as they came under horrific attack from whites. Perhaps it's not that this country has fallen into The Way of Ignorance (Shoemaker & Hoard, November 5), suggests WENDELL BERRY in an excoriating new collection of essays, but that we've always been there. Who knows, but JONATHAN RABAN seems to think either way we're pretty well screwed. His account of life in America after 9/11, My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front (New York Review of Books, November 15), which first appeared in the Seattle alternative weekly the Stranger, is a brisk indictment of America's incapacity for self-criticism.

The world's most traveled Middle East journalist, ROBERT FISK, whose journalism appears in the Seattle Times, has finally delivered his 20-year-in-the-making book on the region he has already described so well, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. (Knopf, November 15). In case you don't have the time to read all 1071 pages, don't worry: the title says it all.

POETRY
BILLY COLLINS may be a big deal in the poetry world, but he's looking at crossover bestseller status with The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (Random House, October 25), which displays all his trademark wit and humor - the kind of humor that comes not from playing for laughs but from being straightforward. Proto-punk diva PATTI SMITH is publishing a book of poems that are not in fact song lyrics, Auguries of Innocence (Ecco, October 11). KEVIN YOUNG, meanwhile, has repackaged a compendium of early work, To Repel Ghosts: The Remix (Knopf, October 4), which could be set to music and a backbeat.

Shame on Kevin - already recycling old work before he's even 40 while 82-year-old Polish Nobel laureate WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA is publishing Monologue of a Dog (Harcourt, November 1), as good a collection as any she's done. Finally, if you buy one volume of poetry this fall to decorate your ego, make it THE COLLECTED POEMS OF KENNETH KOCH (Knopf, November 10), which will annoy if you read straight through its 745 pages but rewards occasional random shuffles with cheeky, sparkling poems like "You Were Wearing," which begins, "You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse."