(Photo: Amanda Prunesti )

John Updike and Philip Roth tackle living with the consequences of destructive choices this fall. Well, not precisely “living with,” in the case of Roth. In Indignation (Houghton Mifflin, September 16), a young man remembers a chain of mistakes that led to his death in 1952—one involving a young woman who pays dearly for her sexual voracity. Updike, meanwhile, revisits his coven of witches in The Widows of Eastwick (Knopf, October 21), 30 years after they terrorized a small Rhode Island town. The old girls are paying for their sexual temerity with, among other things, (endless references to) sagging skin and ropy, veined hands. It’s not easy being a girl in the wound-licking lairs of America’s literary lions.

Related:

• Archive: “Guides”
• Table of Contents: Sep 1, 2008 issue of New York | Subscribe!