Complete book coverage for July 26, 2009

An early work by Arnold Lobel may precede the creation of his popular pair, but the elements of that successful series are already there, as his daughter explains.

A thoughtful consideration of the friendship and feud between two major American writers.

Hawthorne, Melville, Kerouac, Vargas Llosa and more.

Maturity and physical changes intrude on a young girl’s friendship with her three male best friends.

Gothic stories that stab at the reader with a meta-fictional knife.

Christopher Steiner looks ahead and projects, $2 at a time, how rising gasoline prices will transform civilization.

Actors, fashion designers and homosexual vampires run amok in a frenzied fun house of a novel shot through with wild humor.

Mazzucchelli returns with a solo graphic novel.

Despairing of urban life, a nature writer reconnects with the wild in her backyard.

The making of a memoir: ‘Slow Motion.’

Visionary experiences of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Fiction Weeks on list1.The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Doubleday: $26.95) A novelist in 1920s Spain takes a dangerous writing assignment.4 2.Shanghai Girls by Lisa See (Random House: $25) Two sisters from Shanghai encounter tragedy and heartbreak as they are sold into arranged marriages in 1930s Los Angeles.7 3.

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