Complete book coverage for Sept. 13, 2009

Plus: Good e-reads, Los Angeles in the shadows and the 23rd Guadalajara International Book Fair

To the fervent reader and writer, the words on a page encompass the whole wide world and their place in it.

An award-winning children’s book illustrator revisits his childhood and how he sought escape from its bleakness in fantasy.

The author sketches out the development of puzzles as she reveals how they helped her cope with lifelong depression.

Words fail. Memory falters. Personal connection is all but impossible to make. Such is the elegiac poetry of this story collection.

A concise selection of America’s literary, artistic, musical and cinematic high points from the 1929 crash to World War II are superbly captured by the author.

Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ never goes out of fashion, as new editions illustrate.

Fiction Weeks on list1.Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press: $27.95) Noir meets ‘60s Southern California groovy in a private eye’s psychedelic quest. 5 2.The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam: $24.95) The lives of a maid, a cook and a college graduate become intertwined while changing a Mississippi town. 14 3.South of Broad by Pat Conroy (Nan A.

Fiction 1. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson ($14.95) 2.