The June 5 battle of the literary heavyweights looks like an even match. Mr. DeLillo has more at stake: Falling Man (Scribner) is about 9/11, and if you get that wrong, you get pummeled; also, it’s been a long 10 years since Underworld—the last time he delivered a knockout punch. Mr. McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday) is less ambitious—an intimate look at a fraught honeymoon—but he’s coming off back-to-back triumphs with Atonement (2002) and Saturday (2005).

Christopher Buckley has come up with the season’s best subject for a novel: His Boomsday (Twelve, April 2) is a political comedy about euthanasia. On a darker note, Jim Crace, author of Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (1999), sets a post-apocalyptic fable, The Pesthouse (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, May 1), in a ruined America. And if you’re in the mood for a quick nocturnal tour of Tokyo, there’s Haruki Murakami’s After Dark (Knopf, May 8).

Closer to home, it’s a rich season for books about Gotham, including biographies of two titans whose careers spanned the 20th century, Brooke Astor (b. 1902) and the arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein (1906–1996): The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story (Norton, May 21), by Frances Kiernan, and The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, by Martin Duberman (Knopf, April 17). Not so well known, but just as fabulous, writer and editor Leo Lerman (1914-1994) left behind a vast trove of letters and journals, now collected in The Grand Surprise (Knopf, April 10), edited by Stephen Pascal.

Manhattan money matters come under scrutiny in The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. (Doubleday, 4/17), William D. Cohan’s account of a firm whose history stretches back 150 years and features such outsize players as André Meyer, Felix Rohatyn, Steve Rattner, Michel David-Weill and the current capo di tutti capi, Bruce Wasserstein.

And speaking of great men, our nation’s longest-serving President gets a massive one-volume biography with a succinct title: FDR (Random House, May 15), by Jean Edward Smith. Are you ready for a double dose of Albert Einstein? Walter Isaacson, the former chief executive of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine, whose last biography was of Ben Franklin, gives us Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, April 10). Mr. Isaacson’s competition is Jürgen Neffe’s Einstein (F.S.G., May 1), which was a best-seller in Germany.

Two literary greats, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), get new biographies, too. Wharton has been studied extensively, and we already have three superior accounts of her life and work (by Louis Auchincloss, R.W.B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolff), but Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton (Knopf, April 15) is a welcome addition to the canon. In comparison, Arnold Rampersad had a clean slate to work with: His Ralph Ellison (Knopf, April 20) is the authorized biography. Mr. Rampersad, who’s written about Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois, also dabbles in sport: He helped Arthur Ashe write his memoirs and produced a biography of Jackie Robinson.

—Adam Begley

In the fall of 2000, Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., plans to publish a memoir by J.D. Salinger's daughter, Margaret (Peggy) Salinger. The book, entitled Dream-Catcher , is about her childhood and as such will incorporate her relationship with her reclusive father, author of The Catcher in the Rye . Pocket Books president Judith Curr plonked down more than $250,000 in late May for what she told The Observer was "a very important book."

Apparently Riverhead Books didn't think so. Riverhead, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., had previously signed Ms. Salinger, who is 43, to write the book, for an amount which publishing sources put at $250,000. It became known to some at Riverhead as "the secret book." Riverhead co-editorial director Cindy Spiegel, who edited Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , was assigned the task of seeing the book into print. But when Ms. Salinger submitted her manuscript, Riverhead deemed it unacceptable. The editors also discovered that Ms. Salinger, perhaps showing some of her father's stubbornness, was resistant to editing. Riverhead asked for the advance to be returned.

Being a high-minded, literary sort of place-Riverhead authors include Mr. Bloom, Nick Hornby ( About a Boy ) and the Dalai Lama ( The Art of Happiness )-the editors may have been expecting from Mr. Salinger's daughter something that read more like Susan Cheever rather than Christina Crawford. Neither Riverhead publisher Susan Petersen nor Ms. Spiegel could be reached for comment. Robert Gottlieb, Ms. Salinger's agent at William Morris, declined comment.

Meanwhile, Pocket Books is excited about the book, which was Ms. Curr's first acquisition upon arriving from Random House Inc.'s Ballantine Publishing Group in mid-April. "She's a fabulous writer," said Ms. Curr. "She has a unique style. She has a particular turn of phrase. I would call her lyrical, and I would call her insightful. And I would call her mature." Senior editor Nancy Miller will be editing the book, which is due in-house in November, about the time the ducks leave the pond in Central Park.

"It's my great good fortune," said Ms. Curr, of Riverhead's decision not to publish Ms. Salinger's book.

Joyce Maynard, whose 1998 memoir, At Home in the World , disgorged details of her youthful, nine-month dalliance with Mr. Salinger, said she was happy for Ms. Salinger.

"I think it's brave and fine," said Ms. Maynard. "When I knew Peggy she was 17, and I was 19. I spent one of the worst nights of my life trying not to wake Peggy Salinger. The last time I saw her was the day Jerry Salinger sent me out of his life."

Ms. Maynard was recently in the news, in a less than flattering light, for putting 14 of Mr. Salinger's letters up for sale at Sotheby's, where they were auctioned on June 22 to California philanthropist Peter Norton for $156,500. Mr. Norton issued a statement in which he said, "I share the widely expressed opinion that the work should be bought by someone sympathetic to Mr. Salinger's desire for privacy. I plan to return the letters to Mr. Salinger-or do whatever else Mr. Salinger lets me know he wants done with them."

The day before the auction, Ms. Maynard said she was looking forward to Ms. Salinger's book, but not all of its subject matter.

"I'm so weary of the story of J.D. Salinger," said Ms. Maynard. "I'm looking forward to not thinking about him ever again. But I'll read Peggy's book. I think it was a very complicated relationship. I'm sure it's an honest tale."

"A crowning craziness" was how Ralph Ellison described to his close friend and intellectual intimate, Albert Murray, the experience of publishing his 1952 novel Invisible Man . One wonders how he would have perceived the hoopla surrounding his second "novel," Juneteenth (published this month by Random House), which was culled from more than 1,500 pages of Ellison's prose, whittled down to a single narrative and titled Juneteenth by Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan.

The Observer called Mr. Murray, now 83, at his home on West 132nd Street. He described himself as being less mobile than he used to be-"I haven't walked in years"-that is, he explained, without a cane or walker.

"It's natural for Random House to explore what's there," said Mr. Murray of the new Ellison book. "They had an investment in it. There was a contract for 40 years. Random House invested a lot of money in the 60's, way back when money was different." Ellison's editor was the late Joe Fox, who had inherited Ellison from onetime editor in chief Albert Erskine, who also worked with William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.

The very fact of Juneteenth 's publication as a novel doesn't much bother Mr. Murray, who said he and Ellison "agreed on basic views and basic assumptions" when it came to life and literature. "I'm not angry about it, because it's unfinished and says so," he said. "I couldn't take a position on Callahan's decision because I haven't been through the various manuscripts." Of whether the publication of the comparatively inferior Juneteenth could mar Ellison's reputation, Mr. Murray said, " Israel Potter did not diminish Moby-Dick . The response from critics and journalists comes out of the context of celebrity status achieved by Invisible Man . It puts a burden of a special type of ego on Ellison, which they don't know him well enough to do."

Mr. Murray reminisced a bit about Invisible Man 's popularity. "It hit the best seller list immediately," he said, "and was on for eight weeks. But it took several years for it to achieve the status of one of the outstanding novels of the time. Ralph obviously didn't think Invisible Man was the best he could do. And he proceeded from that point of view."

What did Mr. Murray think of Juneteenth ? "I was expecting something else," he said. "I was looking for the story of McIntyre [a journalist in a 1965 short story by Ellison, titled "Juneteenth," which appeared in the Quarterly Review of Literature ] trying to come to terms with American identity. What it doesn't reflect is the ambitious literary undertaking that I though Ralph had in mind. The book is just part of it. But it says so."

Random House is considering publishing Mr. Callahan's "scholar's edition," as opposed to the current version, which Mr. Callahan calls a "reader's edition." And more Ellisoniana is on its way. When Vintage releases the paperback version of Juneteenth , planned for June 2000, Random House will publish a volume tentatively titled Work in Progress: Letters About Literary Craft and American Identity , made up of letters between Mr. Murray and Ellison from the years 1949 to 1960. The volume will also include black and white photographs.

Joe Fox and Mr. Callahan approached Mr. Murray about doing the book of the letters after hearing him read from some of them at a memorial service held for Ellison at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. Mr. Murray handed in the 269-page manuscript a year ago.

"I saw it would be another little Ellison book," said Mr. Murray. "We made arrangements with [agent Andrew] Wylie and Random House and came to very generous terms on that book." William Morris' Owen Laster, the agent for the Ellison estate, brokered the deal.

Ellison's actual letters to Mr. Murray have since been sold to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, a sale arranged by the Upper East Side bookseller Glenn Horowitz. Mr. Murray added that he has "loaned" his own personally inscribed copy of Invisible Man to Mr. Horowitz on the chance it could be sold. The catalogue price is $30,000. Mr. Horowitz is also offering five of Mr. Murray's own books, at prices around $2,500 each.

Why is Mr. Murray selling the precious book? "If I can make these decisions now, I don't have to put somebody in Callahan's position," he said. "People are interested in my papers. Why wait?"

And what would Ellison think of the high price? "He might think, 'All right. You never know how things are going to turn out,'" said Mr. Murray. "Any time great compliments would come, he would have a little bit of modesty."

After six months of wrangling with Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov's son, Foxrock Books publisher Barney Rosset won the battle to publish an English translation of Lo's Diary , the retelling of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from the nymphet's point of view by Italian author Pia Pera. Is the author pleased? Not exactly.

Under the agreement, Mr. Nabokov will write a preface and Ms. Pera will write an afterword, but there's a twist: Mr. Nabokov will be allowed to read her contribution before he writes his own, while she may not read his. Ms. Pera told The Observer she was never told of the two-step procedure. "I'm shocked by the fact of not having been informed," she said. "Shocked and surprised. And speechless."

"I heard that the idea of the American publisher was to have Mr. Nabokov and myself write the text," said Ms. Pera. "I would not see his text, he would not see mine. If what I hear is true, that Mr. Nabokov is writing his text after mine, that's weird. Just weird. In duels people walk 10 steps away from each other, then they turn, face each other, and aim. This is not a duel. This is different from what I was led to believe. The code of honor doesn't apply. Had I known the real situation, I might have written something different." Ms. Pera added that now she may be "touching up" her afterword.

Mr. Rosset said, "I didn't invent that condition, Nabokov did. He said take it or leave it. And I took it." Asked whether he had told Ms. Pera of the condition, Mr. Rosset replied, "As far as I'm concerned, I most certainly did. And if I didn't, I'm sorry. I don't apologize. Everybody had to give. The point was to get the book published."

Peter L. Skolnik, Mr. Nabokov's lawyer, said it wasn't Mr. Nabokov's responsibility to inform Ms. Pera of the terms of the deal.

"All communications with Ms. Pera were conducted through Barney Rosset," he said. "I have never spoken or communicated with Ms. Pera in my life, nor has Dmitri. I had no sense of what Barney was and was not saying to Pera."

The book is scheduled for an October 1999 publication, one year after Mr. Nabokov filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in Federal District Court in Manhattan against Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which subsequently canceled the book. Foxrock will have to pay Farrar the $9,000 for rights to Ann Goldstein's translation of Ms. Pera's novel.

What does Farrar president Roger Straus think about the fact that Ms. Pera's book will finally make it into print in the English language market? "I'm only surprised that Dmitri Nabokov wants this published," said Mr. Straus.

"He let it be published to make it clear that he never had any interest is suppressing the book," said Mr. Skolnik. "He was only going to make sure that people respected the copyrights of his father's work and if they wanted to use those copyrights, they obtain the necessary permissions. He also wanted to make it clear that he was not now saying Yes for the money. He is pleased that what seems to be an intelligent and responsible solution has been found."

Mr. Nabokov is donating the estate's entire $25,000 advance-put up by Foxrock's distributor, Publishers Group West-plus his 5 percent royalties to the writer's group PEN toward a literary prize.

Ms. Pera had some final words for the publisher who fought to publish her book. "I wish all the best to Mr. Rosset and that he can buy himself a beautiful car," she said.

When German media giant Bertelsmann A.G. agreed last October to pay Barnes & Noble Inc. $200 million for a 50 percent stake in Barnesandnoble.com-the Internet bookselling venture-the idea was that Barnes & Noble was getting some cash and Bertelsmann was getting a partner. Nine months later, after the Web site conducted its initial public offering, a peek at the money that executives and directors at Barnesandnoble.com stand to pocket shows that in this equal partnership, one partner may be more equal than the other.

Consider this: If Barnesandnoble.com stock continues to trade around the I.P.O. price of $18 (which is where it closed on June 18, four weeks after the I.P.O.), the chairman of Barnesandnoble.com's board, Leonard Riggio, who is also the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, will be able to turn his 5.1 million stock options into something like $71 million. The vice chairman of the board, Thomas Middelhoff, who is also the chief executive of Bertelsmann, has 40,000 options to buy the stock at $18, which means they are worth exactly zero.

Executives at Barnesandnoble.com who joined the Web start-up after working for Mr. Riggio in the Barnes & Noble corporate family stand to become multimillionaires when they are able to exercise their stock options (generally six months from the I.P.O.). To wit, Mr. Riggio's brother Stephen Riggio, who serves on the boards of both Barnes & Noble and Barnesandnoble.com, has options worth $20 million; Carl Rosendorf, a senior vice president at Barnesandnoble.com who worked for six years at Barnes & Noble College Bookstores Inc., could pocket $12.5 million; William Duffy, a Barnesandnoble.com vice president who spent four years in the Barnes & Noble organization, can bring home $8.8 million.

On the Bertelsmann side, Markus Wilhelm and Klaus Eierhoff, both executives from the Bertelsmann corporate empire as well as board members of Barnesandnoble.com, each have 40,000 options-just like Dr. Middelhoff. But unless the Barnesandnoble.com stock takes off, that won't buy a remaindered Thomas Harris novel.

Marie Toulantis, the chief financial officer at Barnesandnoble.com, said that the disparity of riches is not an indication of Bertelsmann folks being shut out from the cash trough, but rather that those who could get rich are more involved in the company's daily operations. "Bertelsmann is invested and they are great partners, but they are not involved in the company. They're not running the business on a day-to-day basis," Ms. Toulantis said.

She added, "I just want to make it clear, the Barnes & Noble people have worked very hard for years to build this company and any options they received were provided to them in recognition of that."

Jonathan Bulkeley, the chief executive of Barnesandnoble.com who was recruited this January by Bertelsmann's Dr. Middelhoff because of his work on Bertelsmann's joint venture with America Online Inc. in Britain, does stand to pull down a fortune; his 4.1 million options could net him $58 million.

But as Ms. Toulantis pointed out about Mr. Bulkeley (her boss), "He was hired by Mr. Riggio and he reports to Mr. Riggio."

-Gabriel Snyder

You can reach the Publishing column at emanus@observer.com.

Oh, has a novel ever had a murkier provenance than this one? I mean, fires and file cabinets with multiple drafts and handwritten notes on loose pieces of paper and a widow who changed her mind? "The real quality of the paint is always determined by the man who ships it rather than by those who mix it," the luckless narrator of Invisible Man learns. Cut and paste and, whoosh, call it a novel.

I don't think Ellison would have minded the battle royal over the publication of Juneteenth . No one was fonder of the polyphony of American democracy than Ralph Waldo Ellison; he enjoyed it so much it practically consumed him.

Still, have any of the disappointed critics actually read the words on the page? They're terrific. The language tightens the scrotum, it's so good. O.K., maybe it's just one riff of the novel Ellison spent 45 years trying to finish. Maybe it's not a novel at all. I have my doubts about whether a novel with vast American themes, a novel that embraces "realism extended beyond realism," as Ellison described his perpetual work in progress, is achievable, not unless your name is Melville. (The whale got away. Let's admit that.) But Juneteenth contains the most resonant and alluring uses of the American idiom I've read in a while. It's got dream speech and movie talk and the music of the revival meeting and the language of the juke joint all rolled into one. It rolls and riffs. Get down to the bookstore and open it and read, brothers and sisters, read.

Juneteenth doesn't quite have a plot. What it has is an extended two-character interaction that at times forms itself into a coherent narrative and other times seems to follow more the baggy logic of a dream. In the beginning, we are in 50's Washington, D.C., and Adam Sunraider, a xenophobic racist senator, lies in his hospital bed, victim of an assassination attempt. He is kept company by a black preacher named Reverend A.Z. Hickman, a.k.a. God's Trombone. What can be the connection between the two men? Two hints emerge: Sunraider's oratory sounds a lot like preaching; and he starts calling Hickman "Daddy." Intermittently, Sunraider regains awareness. The aged Reverend Hickman nods off. Their states of consciousness merge. Their trains of thought meet in a kind of oblique call and response–and ultimately a story gets told.

Sunraider was Hickman's adopted son, it turns out, a light-skinned boy he named Bliss (as in ignorance is …). Hickman had trained Bliss for the family business. His main job was to pop out of a huge coffin at revivals and cry out: "Lawd, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Was Hickman behind the assassination attempt? Was he trying to put Bliss in a coffin for real? After all, Bliss had turned against his own people. He had exposed black weakness as only one of their own could. Bliss, for his part, imagines he has successfully fled his blackness. His

"hi-yaller"skin allows him to steal the perquisites of superiority in a racist society. The truth turns out to be more complex. As Hickman and Bliss delve deeper into their past, we learn the secret of Bliss' birth. He is white. Hickman knew it, but raised him in the black community, hoping to create a man who could bridge the gap and bring people together, a new Lincoln.

This makes the book sound cleaner than it is. In fact, there are a lot of loose ends, big and small. Some are probably the result of the crewcut the volume's editor, John F. Callahan, gave the original manuscript; others come from the fact that the manuscript was far from finished when Ellison died, age 80, in 1994. It's not clear to me whether a white woman who tries to kidnap the 6-year-old Bliss at a revival meeting is the same woman who, it is revealed later, gave birth to him and abandoned him to Hickman. The ending of the novel, a dream sequence in which Sunraider wanders into an eerie bird shoot, is wonderful–but I can't see how it brings this particular story to an end. Bliss seems one chapter short of being as full a literary creation as Hickman.

If nothing else, Juneteenth leaves you with a strong sense of what Ellison was trying to do during the mid-50's, when most of this text was written. He was already after a very different book than Invisible Man (1952), which became a best seller and won the National Book Award. Ellison's writing wasgrowing broader and more exuberant. Invisible Man 's paranoiddreamlike movement is like Dostoyevsky. Juneteenth is denser, darker (pun intended) and more gothic. The descriptions are Faulknerian, the dialogue by the more ascetic moderns, Joyce and Eliot. Ellison was abandoning "proper English" for the vernacular. There's plenty of room for the reader to explore what the behavior of a white man raised by a black man to think he is a black man means, but the point here is language. I had not expected Ellison to move on from Invisible Man with such speed. He was an astonishing learner. Reading Juneteenth , I understood the stories that circulated over the years about how Ellison was just too fond of this book to publish it; he liked sitting at home reading it, chuckling to himself. He was watching himself get better. It's only a shame time ran out, but then, I suppose, it had to.

Here's a representative passage, Hickman and Bliss' call and response as they explore slavery at a revival meeting. The occasion is Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates June 19, 1865, the date that Union soldiers brought the slaves of Texas the news–two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation–that they were free.

What was it like then, Rev. Bliss? You read the scriptures, so tell us. Give us a word.

WE WERE LIKE THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES!

Amen. Like the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel's dream. Hoooh! We lay scattered in the ground for a long dry season. And the winds blew and the sun blazed down and the rains came and went and we were dead. Lord, we were dead! Except … Except …

… Except what, Rev. Hickman?

Except for one nerve left from our ear …

Listen to him!

And one nerve in the soles of our feet …

… Just watch me point it out, brothers and sisters …

Amen, Bliss, you point it out … and one nerve left from the throat …

… From our throat–right here !

… Teeth …

… From our teeth, one from all thirty-two of them …

… Tongue …

… Tongueless …

… And another nerve left from our heart …

… Yes, from our heart …

… And another left from our eyes and one from our hands and arms and legs and another from our stones …

Amen, hold it right there, Rev. Bliss …

… All stirring in the ground …

… Amen, stirring, and right there in the midst of all our death and buriedness, the voice of God spoke down the Word …

… Crying Do! I said, Do! Crying Doooo–

–these dry bones live?

He said: Son of Man … under the ground, ha! Heatless beneath the roots of plants and trees … Son of Man, do …

I said, Do …

… I said Do, Son of Man, Doooooo!–

–these dry bones live?

Amen! And we heard and rose up. Because in all their blasting they could not blast away one solitary vibration of God's true word…. We heard it down among the roots and among the rocks. We heard it in the sand and in the clay. We heard it in the falling rain and in the rising sun. On the high ground and in the gullies. We heard it lying moldering and corrupted in the earth. We heard it sounding like a bugle call to wake up the dead. Crying, Doooooo! Ay, do these dry bones live!

So if publishing Juneteenth was a mistake, let us have more of them.