All are superstar authors who are releasing hugely anticipated books this fall, colliding in one of the most crowded literary traffic jams in recent memory.
Another, developed recently at the University of Arizona, is meant to help teach written English but not to handle literary traffic, like novel-writing, entirely in A.S.L. SignWriting, which grew out of a system for transcribing movement that Ms. Sutton developed in the 1970's to notate choreography, can be handwritten, or typed using special software.
If your local library has been closed owing to lack of funding, and your funding isn't so hot, either, BookSwim, a literary Netflix trafficking in hard- and softbacks, will deliver the latest Stieg Larsson to your mailbox (bookswim.com; monthly plans from $23.95).
And though tough writers are far from extinct -- authors like Thomas McGuane, Thomas Pynchon, Alan Hollinghurst and Rachel Kushner still tend toward denser syntax -- much of contemporary literary fiction traffics in spare precision rather than obscurity.
The main characters are Lima and Belano, two shambling poets in Mexico City who fund a literary magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by trafficking an expensive marijuana called Acapulco gold; they seem to partake themselves, too, especially Belano, who is an alter ego of Bolaño's.
Reading the book feels like the literary equivalent of passing a traffic accident; it is all but impossible to turn away.
(A note about the word "beautiful": Munro isn't interested in standard literary aesthetics. She doesn't traffic in the artful, the lyrical or the euphonious. When she savages your heart, it's with language almost ostentatious in its refusal to be pretty).
Literary criticism was getting a lot of traffic.
Given how thickly trafficked this corridor of English literary history has been in recent years, a writer like Hollinghurst can spin yards of this soft stuff practically in his sleep.
In "Lob", Thomas fancifully touches base with English tradition, represented as fluid traffic between landscape, language, folk culture and literary culture.
A new novel by Mr Brown will bring thousands of people into bookshops who would not otherwise have set foot there, probably giving booksellers their best traffic in years, says George Lucas, a New York literary agent.
