Summer's over. Time to read seriously again. And nothing is more serious than the subject of Peter L. Bergen's The Osama bin Laden I Know ($26, September). One of the first to see bin Laden for the danger he is, Bergen draws on numerous interviews, many unpublished (including talks with bin Laden's half-brother and high-school English teacher), to profile the world's most-wanted man. Marian Fontana confronts the aftermath of bin Laden's handiwork in A Widow's Walk ($24, September), her memoir—often comic, according to the publisher—of life after her husband died on 9/11. In An American Hostage ($25, October), journalists Micah Green and Marie Helene-Carleton recount a two-part story from Iraq: Green's experiences being taken hostage by insurgents and Helene-Carleton's attempts to free him.
While we're getting serious, researchers Celinda Lake and Kellyanne Conway address the most fundamental question of American life in What Women Really Want ($26, October). Turns out, women are redefining their cultural, domestic and corporate roles—again! On the other hand, maybe not so much: The plucky heroine of Everyone Worth Knowing ($23.95, October), the latest breeze from chick-lit doyenne Lauren Weisberger, wants what all plucky heroines have always wanted: a fab job, a fab social life and a fab man.
What men want is easy: the remote and sports on TV. Harvey Araton's Out of Bounds ($25, November) might change that. It's a broadside against the culture of pro hoops and the racial divide—white people watching a handful of black millionaires that they don't consider real people—at its heart. If you bet on sports, you'll want to read The Smart Money ($25, October), a deep exposé of the sports-betting industry by an insider known only as "44."
From sports freaks to music obsessives: Fall is a good time for Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan completists. David G. Dodd offers The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics 1965-1995 ($35, October)—all the psychedelic backstory you could want—just in time for the 40th anniversary of the band's founding. Meanwhile, The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966 ($45, October) gathers early ephemera between covers.
Now that you've left those summer thrillers at the beach, there's plenty of serious fiction to fill your book bag. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown ($25.95, September—see interview, page 62) is said to be less magical and more realistic than his previous novels, while the stories in T.C. Boyle's Tooth and Claw ($25.95, September) are good old Boyle, frenetic and thinky. E.L. Doctorow sets his latest, The March ($25.95, September), in the Civil War era, while Rick Moody's The Diviners ($25.95, September) is a big, multigenerational epic, and who doesn't want one of those to warm the autumn?
One epic that's come to an end is the life of Hunter S. Thompson. But he lives on in The Mutineer ($30, November), the final volume of his massive trilogy of collected letters. If it's like the other two, it'll contain some of his best writing. November suddenly seems a long way off.