Wintour.
After this fall's book season, the National Endowment for the Arts may have to revise its claim that everyone is reading less for recreation. Some forthcoming books are so exciting, you don't order them. They order you - to grab them.
No one can thumbnail the bounty of this country's publishing business, now producing more than 100,000 books annually. So we're not going to highlight the 40,000 you should examine carefully during the busy season between now and December.
Get thee to a bookstore.
But just for encouragement, here are 20 to get you started:
Fiction
Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley (September). He savaged tobacco execs in Thank You for Smoking and White House hanky-panky in No Way to Treat a First Lady. Now the Forbes FYI editor and Evel Kneivel novelist offers us Florence Farfarletti, angry wife of Prince Bawad of Wasabia, engaged in a secret mission to bring gender rights to the emirate of Matar (pronounced Mutter).
Possibly the first suicide novelist, Buckley injects hilarity into a previously Bahrain fictional landscape. No blurb yet from Prince Bandar. Promoted as an exploration into what happens "when the Shiite hits the fan."
Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick (September). A grandly articulated novel of Jewish refugees from Europe in 1930s New York City by one of our top intellectual essayists and novelists.
Brazil Red by Jean-Christophe Rufin (September). The multitasking cofounder of Doctors Without Borders won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, for this rich historical story of French colonization of Brazil amid noble-savage fantasies.
The Love Wife by Gish Jen (September). The author of Mona in the Promised Land profiles a half-and-half American family, the product of second-generation Chinese American Carnegie Wong marrying Blondie, a WASP. Wait till the Chinese nanny shows up.
