WALT DISNEY
Neal Gabler

First the bad news: Walt Disney is not in the deep freeze somewhere in Tomorrowland. Neil Gabler, the spoilsport biographer, delivers the news that Uncle Walt was, in fact, cremated and his ashes interred “in a remote corner of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, not far from his studio.” Well, at least his spirit hovers near the epicenter of the American imagination. Disney would appear on his television programs as the avuncular host who brought home the coonskin caps and made the tales of Davy Crockett a weekly adventure story. And the “Mickey Mouse Club!” Who can forget the afternoon thrill of watching the fetching Annette Funicello wearing the same mouse ears we had donned? Disney recreated the concept of family entertainment in a new medium, carrying on what Dickens did for serialized novels. Like that other Walt, Disney was the poet of possibilities. Dreams do not die in Disneyland. And to see how they live on, I recommend that you read Neal Gabler’s buoyant biography.

Carl Rollyson (November 8)

THE AENEID
Virgil translated by Robert Fagles

The poet Virgil was famed for licking his verses into shape the way a mother bear licks her newborn cub to give it form. He was rough and meticulous at once. He spoke Latin like a yokel, except when he was declaiming poetry. In his new translation, Robert Fagles isn’t as interested in the sonorous line or passage as he is in the hurtling energy of “The Aeneid.” He approvingly quotes C. S. Lewis’s remark on the “enormous onward pressure” of the poem and he conveys this pressure superbly.

-Eric Ormsby (November 1)

THE LAY OF THE LAND
Richard Ford

“The Lay of the Land” is a great American novel that never resorts to paranoid hyperbole or beatific roadrunning. Richard Ford’s long-time protagonist Frank Bascombe, the seasoned salesman and the worn-out husband, is happy just to be a neutral observer. Mr. Ford’s novel is a huge book, and like many epics can be too episodic. Not deeply moving, it at least convinces the reader that its picture of America is real and will do all of us a service, like the time capsule Bascombe’s son Paul buries at its end, near the beach.

-Benjamin Lytal (November 8)

ECHO PARK
Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly’s latest book “Echo Park” is a hard-boiled cop novel, but a poignant one, examining with clarity and insight two powerful drives: The internal struggle of a good man as well as the external challenge of solving a mystery with finality, etching the solution in marble, so that it’s able to withstand the magnified examinations of time. The book begins suddenly when, by sheer happenstance, the police stop a van at 2:00 a.m. and discover two trash bags filled with women’s body parts. The arrest clearly suggests a solid case. As Mr. Connelly puts it, “Nothing like being caught in the possession of body parts. A defense attorney’s nightmare; a prosecutor’s dream.”

-Otto Penzler (October 25)

SATYR SQUARE
Leonard Barkan

If good Americans go to Paris when they die, as Oliver Wendell Holmes believed, then Leonard Barkan’s year of feasting and friendship in Rome — chronicled in his charming and erudite new memoir, “Satyr Square” —might be described as a little death. Mr. Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton and a former director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, would be the first to embrace the sexual pun. As a scholar of the Renaissance, he knows that the metaphorical link between orgasm and death goes back to Shakespeare. More to the point, Mr. Barkan’s Roman year, as his title suggests, was one long erotic experience: the Piazza dei Satiri, where he lived during a sabbatical in the late 1980s, was a felicitous address. Mr. Barkan fulfills the memoirist’s first duty. More than even his erudition and his palate, it is this intrepidity that allows Mr. Barkan to make “Satyr Square” such an intriguing and humane book.

-Adam Kirsch (October 25)