This summer, in between the latest installments of franchises like “Star Wars” and “Batman,” Hollywood will try its hand at the original sci-fi epic: H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds.” Readers who want to compare the Tom Cruise version to the Victorian original, which also inspired Orson Welles’s famous radio hoax, can turn to a timely new edition of the novel from New York Review Books (June), complete with illustrations by Edward Gorey.

Nick Hornby is another British writer whom Hollywood loves to adapt. This summer will bring his fourth novel, “A Long Way Down” (Riverhead, June), about four troubled souls who meet on New Year’s Eve as they consider jumping off the roof of a London high-rise. Meanwhile, Piers Paul Read’s authorized biography, “Alec Guinness” (Simon and Schuster, July), examines the secretive man behind the great actor, better known today as Obi-Wan Kenobi than for his stage triumphs and caustic Ealing comedies.

Without the modern city, there would be no modern novel: The two were born together in the 18th century, and perhaps they are now being superseded together. (The nonfiction novel, one might say, is the literary equivalent of the suburb, omnivorous and structureless.) In “Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel” (Yale University Press, June), Robert Alter – one of the best literary scholars alive – charts the history of that symbiosis, showing how fictional style evolved to meet the challenge of describing the modern metropolis. Flaubert’s Paris, Dickens’s London, Joyce’s Dublin, and Bely’s Petersburg are among the “unreal cities” to benefit from Mr. Alter’s close reading.

Louise Bogan is one of those literary stars that time has reduced to cameo roles in other writers’ biographies. A poet and the longtime poetry critic of the New Yorker, Bogan (1897-1970) had close literary and personal friendships with Edmund Wilson and Theodore Roethke, among other modernist luminaries. “A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings”(Ohio University Press, June) will bring Bogan herself back into the spotlight, with a generous selection of her fiction, memoirs, and lively letters.

For a country the size of a continent, Australia occupies remarkably little space on Americans’ psychic atlases – even though the Australians’ history of British colonialism, aboriginal dispossession, and environmental challenge is intriguingly similar to our own. “Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia,” by Frank Welsh (Overlook, August), will help fill in those blanks, as it tells the story of Australia’s growth from convict settlement to independent Pacific power.

From the time it opened in 1980, the so-called “Nobel Prize sperm bank” was halfway between a punch line and a sinister omen. In “The Genius Factory” (Random House, June), journalist David Plotz uncovers the true story of the Center for Germinal Choice, started by an eccentric millionaire in order to spread the genes of great scientists and inventors. The book tracks down some of the 200 children conceived over the two decades of the center’s life, and examines the good and ill effects of this homegrown eugenics project.

The legendary silence of Henry Roth has become as much a part of American literature as his 1934 masterpiece, the Jewish-immigrant novel “Call It Sleep.” This summer, Roth’s mysteries – why did he stop writing for six decades, only to burst back into print with a flood of late novels? Did he commit incest with his sister, as he described in his autobiographical fiction? – will finally be explored by Stephen G. Kellman’s crisp new biography, “Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth”(W.W. Norton, July).

Two other masters will also be illuminated by big books this summer. “The Letters of Robert Lowell” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June) documents the turbulent life and brilliant sensibility of one of America’s best poets. And the long-awaited biography “Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature,” by Lewis Dabney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, August), will tell the whole story of America’s answer to Samuel Johnson.

Some of our best-loved novelists will be back in the stores with new books this sum mer. Cormac McCarthy will publish “No Country for Old Men” (Alfred A. Knopf, July), his first novel since the Border Trilogy that established him as the Faulkner of the Southwest. In Mr. McCarthy’s new book, a spiral of intrigue and violence begins when a hunter stumbles upon dead bodies and a cache of heroin. John Irving returns with his latest outsized novel, “Until I Find You” (Random House, July), which tells the story of an actor’s bizarre childhood and tumultuous love life. Michael Cunningham follows up his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hours” with “Specimen Days” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June), borrowing his title this time from Walt Whitman instead of Virginia Woolf. Once again, Mr. Cunningham offers three stories with related characters, spread over the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and drawing on genres from science fiction to the thriller.

Two younger writers will also have notable books in the stores this summer. Marcel Beyer is one of the rising stars of German fiction; his newly translated novel “Spies” (Harcourt, July) treats that favorite theme of postwar German writers, the concealment and discovery of the past, through the story of four young cousins who discover a strange family album. And Benjamin Kunkel, one of the editors behind the intrepid new little magazine n+1, debuts as a novelist with “Indecision”(Random House, August), a philosophical comedy about a young man whose life offers all too many choices – rather like the summer publishing season.