Nonfiction

Cary Grant: The Biography, by Marc Eliot (Harmony). Billed as the first full-length, definitive biography of the film star.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt (Norton). How a man from the English provinces, without wealth, education or connections, became a revered playwright.

In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon). The author/illustrator of the ground-breaking graphic novel Maus chronicles 9/11 and its aftermath in a comic strip format.

Alice Walker: A Life, by Evelyn C. White (Norton). An assessment of the woman who was born into a Georgia share-cropping family and became the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (The Color Purple).

Fiction

The Love Wife, by Gish Jen (Knopf). An interfering Chinese-American mother tries to impose a mainland Chinese "nanny" (read: ethnically suitable mate) on her married son, in a novel by the author of Who's Irish?

Shade, by Neil Jordan (Bloomsbury). A novel by the fiction writer (Night in Tunisia) and filmmaker (The Crying Game) about a murder victim whose body is never found, so she becomes a "shade," forever "watching - and retelling - the event of her life, and afterlife."

The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips (Random House). The author of the terrific Prague - about American expatriates in Budapest - changes gears with the story of an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king.

October

Nonfiction

Magical Thinking: True Stories, by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's). Personal essays by the author of Running with Scissors.

Margot Fonteyn: A Life, by Meredith Daneman (Viking). The life of the dancer who started out as Peggy Hookham of suburban England and became the most famous ballerina of her time.

Chronicles: Volume I, by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster). Dylan's memoirs were originally slated for autumn 2002. The publisher won't divulge the contents but promises it is "really, really happening."

Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher, by Joan Reardon (North Point Press). Billed as the first full-length biography of the renowned food writer (The Art of Eating).

Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer - America's Deadliest Serial Murderer, by Ann Rule (Free Press). The master true-crime author on the lethal criminal.

Fiction

The Red Queen, by Margaret Drabble (Harcourt). An Oxford student mysteriously receives a 200-year-old memoir by a Korean crown princess, just before she makes a trip to Seoul.

Dillinger in Hollywood: New and Selected Short Stories, by John Sayles (Nation Books). A retrospective collection by the noted filmmaker (Eight Men Out) and novelist (Union Dues).

Light on Snow, by Anita Shreve (Little, Brown). The best-selling writer (The Pilot's Wife) takes a father and daughter's snowy rescue of an infant as its starting point.

Villages, by John Updike (Knopf). A software company founder's life, from his boyhood to his East Coast retirement.

November

Nonfiction

The Inner Voice: Notes from a Life Onstage, by Renee Fleming (Viking). The famous soprano meditates on her influences, education and how she sustains her art.

When Nothing Else Matters: Michael Jordan's Final Comeback, by Michael Leahy. Jordan's last attempt at professional ball, and what it cost him and his team.

Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum (Norton). A biography of the exceedingly funny British writer, creator of Jeeves, Psmith and the Empress of Blandings, among other paragons of Englishness.

Right Turns, by Michael Medved (Crown Forum). The film critic's story of his journey "from secularism to religion," from single man to family man.

Fiction

Runaway, by Alice Munro (Knopf). The great Canadian short-story writer's book of tales includes some that are interconnected.

Magic Seeds, by V.S. Naipaul (Knopf). The Nobel laureate's sequel to Half a Life follows the peripatetic life of protagonist Willie Chandran as he joins an underground movement in India and then returns to England.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In her first novel since her 1981 debut, Housekeeping, Robinson portrays four generations of preachers.

December

Nonfiction

The Children's Blizzard: January 12, 1888, by David Laskin (HarperCollins). The story of one of the deadliest blizzards to hit the Midwest, claiming among its victims hundreds of European immigrants who had no idea of the heartland's extremes of weather.

Fiction

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, by Yann Martel (Harcourt). Four novellas by the Booker prize-winner (Life of Pi).

Bad Dirt, by Annie Proulx (Scribner). Stories by the author of The Shipping News, including one enticingly titled "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?"