Need a hint? Here’s the same photo with some red circles to help:

Still need some help figuring it out? Notice how it says “New” fiction hardcovers on that little black sign there. Amazingly, the authors of all three of the circled books are dead! To be honest, I think the authors of at least a couple other books on the table are deceased too, but at a glance I only noticed the three. Let’s see just what they are.

Book 1: The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

The Gathering Storm is the latest in a long-running epic fantasy series known as The Wheel of Time. The first volume of the series was released in 1990, and the latest, published this October, was #12. The brainchild of James Oliver Rigney, Jr., writing under the pen name Robert Jordan, the series is known for its length, girth, breadth, size, mass, wordcounts, and weight. Originally intended as a 6-book series, Jordan soon realized that the story he set out to tell could not be wrapped up in six volumes, due in part to his long-winded writing style and the massive scope of the complex plotlines he had created in the first three or four novels. He soon doubled his estimate, intending to end the series in twelve novels. Volume eleven was published in 2005, after which Jordan promised his faithful readers that the next book in the series would be the last, no matter how long it turned out to be. The only problem is, Mr. Jordan died in 2007 from a rare blood disease called cardiac amyloidosis! After some scrambling on the part of his widow and publisher, it was decided to pass the torch for the final novel to another fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson, who began his work assisted by the copious notes left behind by his predecessor. However, due to the amount of material still left to write, it was decided that the “final” novel be split into thirds, released one each year in 2009, 2010, and 2011. The Gathering Storm represents the first third of that meganovel, essentially.

Book 2: Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton, king of the airport bookstore and crown prince to the page-to-screen blockbuster empire, medical expert and creator of the smash television hit E.R., died of throat cancer in 2008. However, as I am beginning to learn, death is no barrier to getting your work published, at least if you have (had) the right credentials! Pirate Latitudes was discovered on the late author’s computer, unfinished but more or less whole, by one of his personal assistants. The book is set in the 17th century Caribbean, and features (you guessed it) everyone’s favorite scurvy scourges of the sea, pirates! Need we say more? Well, I will. There was another more-or-less finished novel on Crichton’s computer that is slated to be released in 2010. And if that wasn’t enough, the film rights to Latitudes have already been optioned by… Stephen Spielberg! How droll. I suppose it would be more appropriate if Spielberg were dead.

Book 3: The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov

The third of our zombie authors with new books out probably stinks a bit worse that his compatriots; he has been dead since 1977. Vladimir Nabokov, part of a proud literary tradition of mad Russians, is often cited as one of the most important authors of the last century, which might be how he can get away with putting out new material 32 years after his death. He is perhaps best known for his Lolita, but I’m waiting for the sequel which he’s undoubtedly working on as we speak. If only we could all be so productive after our lives have been extinguished. The Original of Laura was actually the novel Nabokov was working on when he died, but all that existed of it at the time of his death were a series of handwritten notecards with a very rough version of the story written on them. Although the author asked his son to burn these should he pass away before finishing the novel, the cards instead sat for the past 30 years in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland, until the son decided to publish the fragmentary manuscript and frighten us all just a little with another new novel from an old dead guy. Interestingly, the published hardcover book is page after page of high-resolution scans of the actual index cards, accompanied by the printed text of each. Why it was published this way and not as an actual novel is somewhat of a mystery, but it is sure to be a work of great curiosity to any Nabokov fan. Michael Crichton was apparently one of those (a Nabokov fan) by the way. If it turns out that Nabokov was Robert Jordan’s long lost uncle our little macabre circle will be complete.

So we’ve moved from novels about zombies to novels written by zombies, and judging by the popularity of Stephanie Meyer books recently, novels read largely by brain-dead zombies as well.