Enthusiasts of literature can anticipate a rich array of novels, biographies, memoirs, poetry anthologies, and pertinent nonfiction this autumn.

The following five forthcoming titles are poised to generate considerable buzz.

Marlon James' fantasy series "Dark Star" showcased his extraordinary, seemingly boundless imagination.

In "The Disappearers," he returns to his native Jamaica and the brutal reality depicted in his Booker Prize-winning "A Brief History of Seven Killings."

The new novel, longlisted for the Booker, is structured around the horrific 1988 beating of eight gay men who had been rehearsing for a play.

James weaves together humor, popular culture, compassion, and profoundly harsh lived experience.

"I refuse to believe there is any lesson to be learned from suffering an atrocity," James writes, "other than always be on guard for the ways people turn on you."

(Sept. 1)

Kai Bird is best known as the co-author, alongside Martin J. Sherwin, of “American Prometheus,” the biography of nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer that served as the basis for Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning film “Oppenheimer.”

In “American Scoundrel,” he and his wife, Susan Goldmark, trace the influence of the late political operative Roy Cohn, from his early career as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief aide to his mentorship of a young Donald Trump.

The book draws on government documents, archival material, and dozens of interviews, including—much to the authors’ surprise—Trump himself, who, as Bird notes in the acknowledgments, “answered our cold calls on his personal cell on several occasions.”

Trump was “gracious, if not exactly forthcoming about his memories” and declined to meet in person, explaining, “I’m the president. I’m very busy. I have China calling. I have Russia calling. I cannot do it.”

(Sept. 1)

Emma Cline has firmly established her mastery of capturing the alienated mind, vividly portraying the fleeting nature, ambition, and deceit of youth—most notably in her acclaimed debut, "The Girls."

In "Switzy," longlisted for the Booker Prize, Cline introduces a retired businessman whose mental faculties are declining, traveling to an assisted dying facility in Zurich.

She divides the narrative into short, emotionally flat segments as this once-"Valuable Person" reflects on his memories and concludes that "He had always stayed on the surface. His whole life." (Sept. 8)

“Music Against the Night” is Yiyun Li’s sixth novel, and her first book since last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” her unsparing memoir about the suicides of her two sons.

This time, Li appears to have written a very different narrative — about a late 18th-century piano prodigy whose fame barely outlasted his lifetime, and the orphaned wanderer-musician who makes the ill-fated decision to marry him.

The novel is a story of music, but also a meditation on “the night,” death — of parents, friends, children, everyone.

“It is despair that one must not submit to,” Li writes late in the book, adding a dark, Shakespearean warning: “A child’s death can never feel neutral to a parent; a child’s death is a negation of time, which no longer has now and then, now and again, now and later, only now and now and now and now and now.”

(Oct. 13)

Memoirs often give presidents their best chance to shape their legacy, though readers and critics may have different priorities, such as Richard Nixon and Watergate or Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

Joe Biden will understandably want to highlight his defeat of Donald Trump in 2020, the passage of major green energy legislation, and the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, among other achievements.

However, the public will likely seek answers to more uncomfortable questions, especially about Biden's health during his presidency, the circumstances behind his disastrous debate against Trump, and his subsequent decision to end his reelection campaign.