"A ghost knows who to scare," Marlon James writes in a characteristically pithy chapter-opening sentence midway through his 600-page new fantasy novel "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" (Riverhead). So, let it be said, does James.

The new book "Pagan Light — Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri" by Jamie James (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is a social history of the isle and its place in the Western imagination.

You don't have to know a jot about the New Narrative to find Killian's new book "Fascination" (Semiotext(e) Native Agents, $16.95) a goddam laugh riot.

In author Stephen King's "Elevation"'s brief 160 pages, we meet Scott Carey, an athletic 42-year-old Castle Rock, Maine man.

Edited by Peggy Fox and Thomas Keith, "The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin" (Norton, $39.95) chronicles the decades-long relationship between the author and the founder of his publisher New Directions.

"Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance," published by Yale University Press as part of its "Jewish Lives" series, is no love letter.

"We Make It Better: The LGBTQ Community and Their Positive Contributions to Society" co-authors Eric Rosswood and Kathleen Archambeau share stories of people from queer history, and explain how their contributions made the world a better place.

Visit your favorite independent bookseller or the love-it-or-hate-it Amazon.com to reserve and order copies of these forthcoming LGBTQ books for readers of all rainbow stripes.

Architect Philip Johnson is the title subject of Mark Lamster's rich, authoritative, compulsively readable new biography, "The Man in the Glass House" (Little, Brown).

With a title like "1,000 Books To Read Before You Die — A Life-Changing List" by James Mustich (Workman), you know someone like Out There is going to be coming along to deflate the balloon.

Whether or not you appreciate "Drag Race" hostess and impresario RuPaul Andre Charles, he remains one of the pioneers of the drag queen universe after three decades as a public figure.

There was a certain electricity in Davies Symphony Hall last Friday night as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the San Francisco Symphony for the first time since his appointment as Music Director Designate was announced at the end of last year.

"Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants" (New Directions), written in French in 2010, is an intoxicant of a different kind, even if the named intoxicants in it are of manifold kinds.

Olivia de Havilland (b. 1916), the last living star from the 1930s, published "Every Frenchman Has One" (1961) about her life in France following her marriage to Paris "Match" editor Pierre Galante, but has yet to write her memoirs.