This is biography on a monumental scale, detailed and exhaustively scrupulous a study of it's subject as Mark Schorer's doorstop sized SINCLAIR LEWIS, An American Life (1961). And what a life it was. John Cheever's work won him all the major awards, big publishing contracts, esteem of colleages, mass public adulation, but left him bereft--an auguished man whose inner turmoil no amount of success could lessen for long.

FLANNERY: A Life of Flanner O"Connor, by Brad Gooch, Little Brown & Co.,2009.

Flannery O'Connor's publication of A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND (1955), was the most impressive debut story collection since publication of Richard Wright's UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN (1938). O'Connor was hailed by one critic as another Kafka, by others as the most distinctive voice of what some called a "Southern Renascence" in mid-century American writing.

WHITE HEAT, The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple, Alfred A Knopf, 2008.

Those inchanted by the poetry of the "Belle of Amherst," as well as the story of her struggle to produce an original art form, will find much to admire in the latest contribution to Dickinson scholarship and legend, WHITE HEAT, by Brenda Wineapple.

MOSHERLAND: The Fiction of Howard Frank Mosher

Those readers who have read only the first of Howard Frank Mosher's nine published novels cannot be blamed for thinking of Mosher as a magical realist. Hero of DISAPPEARANCES (1977) Quebec Bill Bonhomme scales a fur tree and catapults out over a lake he drops into from 150 feet then kills a mutant albino zombie, follower of a madman named Carcajou who, it is suggested, is the Devil. A fairly realistic rendering of a whiskey-smuggling operation turns fantastical and gothic.

2666, by Robet Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008, 30.00$.

2666 is a big book. Five interrelated novels rolled into a gigantic 20th century epic. Also a book of story-telling at its best. A novel that is murder mystery with sci-fi elements and straight docudrama reporting: part Kafka, part Vonnegut, and part Sherwood Anderson (the Anderson of POOR WHITE).

THE KEROUAC FESTIVAL

LOWELL, Massachusetts, an old mill town on the polluted Merrimack River, hosts a Kerouac festival each October in honor of perhaps it's most famous as well as infamous son (certainly its greatest literary figure).

HITLER, A biography, by Ian Kershaw, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2008, 1030 pages, 39.95$.