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It’s a heavy-hitting fall in the literary world. Jonathan Franzen just emerged with a memoir, The Discomfort Zone, which The New York Times at least thought just made the guy seem like a dick. Cormac McCarthy (the novelist lauereate of the blood-soaked American countryside) releases The Road in just a couple weeks. The book is a break from McCarthy’s past oeurve; the story details the trek of a man and his young son across the blasted wasteland of a post-apocalyptic world. With a similarly thrilling premise, Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker sounds promising as well. No doubt as brainy as past classics from Powers like Galatea 2.2 and The Gold Bug Variations, Echo is worth getting excited about.

But really, the real reason to be a breathing human being this fall is the return of Thomas Pynchon. The Man’s novel, Against the Day, is only number six in a 40-plus-year career and his first since 1997’s Mason & Dixon, making the publication a genuine event. Add this to the fact that in my mind, Pynchon has few (if any) literary peers in the past century and you have a very special book indeed. Expect to see any news about the publication (however trivial) to be touched on here. I haven’t been this excited about a new book in a long, long time.

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