Bibliophiles this autumn can anticipate a cornucopia of fiction, biographies, memoirs, poetry anthologies, and topical nonfiction.

Here are five forthcoming titles destined to dominate the literary discourse.

Marlon James’s fantasy saga “Dark Star” served as a testament to his prodigious and unbounded imaginative faculties.

In “The Disappearers,” he returns to his native Jamaica and to the lethal actuality of his Booker Prize-winning “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”

The new novel, longlisted for the Booker, is structured around the appalling 1988 assault on eight gay men who had been in rehearsal for a theatrical production.

James interweaves humor, popular culture, compassion, and profoundly harrowing 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 most renowned as the co-author, alongside Martin J. Sherwin, of “American Prometheus,” the biography of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer that served as the foundation for Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award-winning film “Oppenheimer.”

In “American Scoundrel,” he and his wife, Susan Goldmark, trace the enduring influence of the late political operative Roy Cohn, from his formative years as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s principal aide to his tutelage of a young Donald Trump.

“American Scoundrel” draws upon governmental records, archival materials, and scores of interviews—including, to the authors’ astonishment, Trump himself, who, as Bird recounts 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 long since consolidated her reputation for inhabiting the alienated psyche, for dramatizing the evanescence, ambition, and duplicity of youth—a mastery most conspicuously evidenced in her acclaimed debut, *The Girls*.

In *Switzy*, longlisted for the Booker Prize, Cline presents a retired businessman of deteriorating cognitive faculties, bound for an assisted-dying facility in Zurich.

She fractures the narrative into terse, affectless vignettes as a once-“Valuable Person” confronts his recollections, arriving at the realization 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 concerning the suicides of her two sons.

This time, Li appears to have crafted a markedly divergent narrative — that of a late 18th-century piano prodigy whose renown barely outlasted his own lifetime, and the orphaned itinerant musician who makes the calamitous decision to wed him.

The novel constitutes a narrative of music, yet equally a rumination upon “the night,” upon death — of parents, friends, children, all.

“It is despair that one must not submit to,” Li writes near the book’s conclusion, appending a somber, Shakespearean admonition: “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 frequently constitute a president’s most auspicious avenue for cementing their historical legacy, notwithstanding the divergent priorities that readers and critics may harbor, whether concerning Richard Nixon and Watergate or Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

Joe Biden will, understandably, aspire to foreground his defeat of Donald Trump in 2020, the enactment of landmark legislation pertaining to green energy, and the appointment of the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, among other accomplishments.

Yet the public will likely seek elucidation on more unwelcome matters, notably the state of Biden’s health during his tenure in the White House, the backstory behind his calamitous debate against Trump, and his subsequent decision to abandon his reelection campaign.

(Nov. 17)