Even the most ordinary, everyday objects have a history: recent years have brought us books on the history of condiments (“Salt: A World History”), commodities (“Coal: A Human History”), and comestibles (“The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World”). This fall comes “Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug” (Bloomsbury USA, September), in which Diarmuid Jeffreys tells the story of the pill that keeps on giving – once a mere pain-killer, it’s now used as a preventive against heart attacks and strokes. Meanwhile, David V. Herlihy turns to another modern wonder in “Bicycle: The History,” tracing it from the early days of the “mechanical horse”(when Mark Twain advised, “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it – if you live”) through its current high-tech incarnation.

No writer has done more to popularize Darwin – and to infuriate creationists – than Richard Dawkins, whose notion of “the selfish gene” has helped many nonscientists understand how life could have evolved out of the primal soup. In “The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution” (Houghton Mifflin, October), Mr. Dawkins offers a guided tour through the whole evolutionary tree, from modern Homo sapiens back to the origins of life 4 billion years ago, showing how we are related to primates, mammals, and microorganisms.

With “Erasure,” his bitterly satirical novel about the temptations and dilemmas of the black writer, Percival Everett won a wide audience for the first time. Now he returns with “Damned If I Do” (Graywolf, November), a collection of stories, whose subjects include an old man who gets into a high-speed car chase and a sandwich-shop employee who can fix anything, from a broken mustard dispenser to a sexual identity crisis.

Back in 1913, as the visual arts were being revolutionized by modernism, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire published one of the first and most influential studies of “The Cubist Painters.” Now that this landmark of art history is back in print, in a new translation by Peter Read (California, October), readers can see how a major writer reacted to the major painters of his time, including Picasso, Braque, and Picabia.

One unintended side effect of the Cold War was to turn the American government into a major patron of the arts – sometimes clandestinely, as with the CIA’s funding of Encounter magazine, sometimes openly, as when the State Department sent American writers and artists on trips around the world. In “Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War” (Harvard, December), Penny M. Von Eschen shows what happened when jazz giants like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were turned into goodwill ambassadors – making music, falling in love, and giving Iraq, the Congo, and the USSR their first taste of American and African-American culture. To catch up on the successors to those legends, turn to “Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century” (Oxford, November), a collection of essays by the jazz historian Gary Giddins.

Brooke Allen is the rare literary critic who is always worth reading. In “Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior” (Ivan R. Dee, September), her new collection of essays, Ms. Allen offers appreciations of the “rogues’ gallery of weirdos” who have so often been misrepresented as a “dim procession of canonical ‘dead white males'” – including Pepys, Boswell, Hawthorne, Thackeray, and L. Frank Baum. Meanwhile, in “A Fine Brush on Ivory” (Oxford, October), the charming British writer Richard Jenkyns offers an appreciation of one of the least weird members of the canon, Jane Austen.

Anyone who has seen “It’s a Wonderful Life” remembers the scene where the young George Bailey flourishes his copy of National Geographic, boasting: “Only us explorers can get it!” In “Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made” (The Penguin Press, November), Robert M. Poole, the magazine’s former executive editor, shows how it has been feeding the dreams of junior and senior explorers since 1888. Mr. Poole also tells the story of the family behind the magazine, the Grosvenors; of Alexander Graham Bell, a Grosvenor by marriage who helped start the monthly; and of the many explorers it sponsored, from Jacques Cousteau to Jane Goodall.