After the usual summer lull, fall is shaping up to be the most exciting publishing season of 2006. Already, the most talked-about book of the fall is Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day” (Penguin Press, November), his first new novel since “Mason & Dixon,” almost a decade ago.

Appropriately for this reclusive writer, the buzz began when a description of the new book mysteriously surfaced on Amazon.com, before any official announcement had been made.

So far, the only sure things are that “Against the Day” will be, like all Mr. Pynchon’s books, huge (1,120 pages), ambitious (it begins with the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and ends after World War I), and wildly antic: “The sizable cast of characters,” the publisher promises, “includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns.”

Mr. Pynchon is not the only major novelist we will be reading and talking about this fall. In “The Lay of the Land” (Alfred A. Knopf, October), Richard Ford brings back Frank Bascombe, the middle-aged Realtor hero of “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day,” for another reckoning with family, aspiration, and mortality.

Cormac McCarthy, who has created his own genre — the Faulknerian-existentialist Western — returns with “The Road” (Alfred A. Knopf, September), the story of a father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

The intellectually voracious Richard Powers, whose novels have addressed cutting-edge subjects like artificial intelligence and virtual reality, tackles brain chemistry in “The Echo Maker” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, October), the story of a man who develops a bizarre memory disorder after a car accident. And one of the most interesting novelists of the 1930s, Daniel Fuchs, will be back in bookstores again with an omnibus edition of “The Brooklyn Novels” (Black Sparrow Press, October), his three classic stories about Jewish-immigrant Brooklyn.

As the reputation of Virginia Woolf has grown, that of her husband Leonard has become more embattled. Few readers now remember that Leonard Woolf was an important intellectual in his own right — a member of the Cambridge Apostles, along with Lytton Strachey and E.M. Forster; a prominent adviser to the Labour Party; and a prolific author, whose five-volume memoir is his masterpiece. Instead, biographical attention has fixated on his response to his wife’s mental illness: Was he a loving caretaker or a stifling control freak? Victoria Glendinning, the award-winning biographer, should provide some definitive answers in the first-ever biography devoted specifically to “Leonard Woolf” (Free Press, November).

October marks the centenary of another major 20th-century writer, Hannah Arendt. In “Why Arendt Matters” (Yale University Press), Arendt’s biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, argues that her ideas about war, totalitarianism, and evil remain as relevant as ever. And Penguin Classics issues a new edition of Arendt’s most controversial book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

Ron Rosenbaum, currently a columnist for the New York Observer, is consistently one of the best journalists around. His curiosity extends to just about any subject you could name; he writes with equally infectious enthusiasm about Nabokov, Bob Dylan, and Yale’s secret societies. His last book, “Explaining Hitler,” was the kind of intellectual anthropology Mr. Rosenbaum does best, exploring all the ways that historians try to make sense of an inexplicable evil. Now, in “The Shakespeare Wars” (Random House, September) he brings his brand of reporting to a more benign, but still controversial, matter: how today’s scholars and experts interpret, edit, and perform Shakespeare.

Some other books to look forward to this fall are a second volume of memoirs from the often loathsome, but usually entertaining, Gore Vidal, “Point-to-Point Navigation” (Doubleday, November); linguist David Crystal’s exploration of “How Language Works” (Overlook, November); critic John Sutherland’s instruction manual on “How to Read a Novel”(St. Martin’s Press, October); and the modestly titled “On Truth” (Alfred A. Knopf, November), philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s follow-up to his unlikely best seller, “On Bullshit.”

Finally, some of our leading poets will have new volumes in bookstores this fall. Mark Strand, whose spare poems are always charged with strangeness, publishes “Man and Camel” (Alfred A. Knopf, September), his first new collection since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Another Pulitzer winner, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, gives us a new volume of his brilliantly playful poems, “Horse Latitudes,” as well as “The End of the Poem” (both Farrar, Straus & Giroux, October), a collection of the wide-ranging lectures he delivered as Oxford’s professor of poetry.

There has been much complaining in the poetry world lately that Geoffrey Hill, one of the best and most morally challenging poets writing today, is without an American publisher; this fall that omission will finally be remedied, when Mr. Hill’s “Selected Poems” appears along with his newest collection, “Without Title”(both Yale University Press, November).

Other noteworthy books appearing this fall from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of our best publishers of poetry, are Frederick Seidel’s “Ooga-Booga” (November), the “Collected Poems”of C.K. Williams (November), and a “Selected Poems” from James Fenton (October). And the Library of America will add a new modern master to its canon with “Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters” (October).