Fans of chick lit have really taken to Jennifer Weiner, with novels like “Good in Bed” and “Little Earthquakes” selling well. She has a new one, “The Guy Not Taken,” just coming out. In nonfiction, check out “Bella Figura,” by Beppe Severgnini, an Italian who considers his nation a land of “curious lost souls.” John Banville’s “The Sea” won Britain’s Man Booker prize this year and has just been released in paperback. Coming in November is Neal Gabler’s biography of one of the most recognizable names in 20th-century entertainment, Walt Disney.
FICTION
The Guy Not Taken, by Jennifer Weiner, Simon & Schuster, 292 pages, $24.95 | Chick-lit best seller Weiner offers 11 stories about 30-ish women battling away in the world of dating and dysfunctional families.
“The Three Musketeers,” by Alexander Dumas and translated by Richard Pevear, Viking, 736 pages, $35 | One of the world’s leading translators, Pevear and Viking want this to become THE translation of Dumas’ much-loved adventure tale published in 1844.
Armageddon’s Children, by Terry Brooks, Random House, 371 pages, $26.95 | The first in a new fantasy trilogy by the author of the Shannara series imagines a frightening near-future in the United States.
NONFICTION
La Bella Figura, by Beppe Severgnini, Broadway, 240 pages, $23.95 | After showing a fondness for the U.S. in “Ciao, America,” Severgnini takes a harsher look at his native land and all its paradoxes.
Democracy: A History, by John Dunn, Grove/Atlantic, 256 pages, $24.95 | Britisher Dunn traces the roots of democracy by looking at the methodology of its practitioners and its detractors.
Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, by Robert Young Pelton, Crown, 368 pages, $24 | Pelton takes readers into the shadowy world of a recent offshoot of the fight against terrorism – the private security contractor.
PAPERBACKS
The Sea, by John Banville, Knopf, 208 pages, $12.95 | The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, “The Sea” is a novel of love and loss and how each affect a person’s memory.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages, $14.95 | Following a dozen families, Egan tells the story of the great dust storms and drought that hit during the depths of the Great Depression.
Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis, Knopf, 416 pages, $13.95 | Ellis, himself, becomes the protagonist in this meta-fictional tale of a man who, though hooked on drugs, has a shot at redemption.
COMING UP
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler, Knopf, 816 pages, $35, Nov. | The author of a biography of Walter Winchell, Gabler turns his sights on one of the giants of the entertainment industry.
Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman, Morrow, 384 pages, $26.95, Oct. | Gaiman (“Anasasi Boys”) offers up a whopping 31 stories from the ragged edge of life and even the afterlife.
The Rising Tide, by Jeff Shaara, Ballantine, 672 pages, $27.95, Nov. | Shaara has made a career of writing novels set in wartime. He’s hit the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War I. With this new one, he starts on a trilogy of World War II.
