To the growing number of neologisms the internet has brewed up with Jonathan Franzen’s pleasantly Germanic last name, I wish to add another: the Franzenfall. This is a season where, because the Fitzgerald of middle-class post-millenium America is publishing a new novel, the literary commentariat can go into a tailspin trying to keep up with not just their opinions of the novel but their opinions of his quotes in the innumerable profiles and interviews sure to accompany it. This Franzenfall is already off to a healthy start in that regard, as you may know.

If you end up reading Purity you are bound to find a whole host of people who are willing to discuss your opinion of it over single-origin French roast or a negroni (or maybe more likely bourbon). But, you will no doubt be pleased to learn, there are other books appearing in North American bookstores this fall worth reading. Here’s an overview of both those bound to make a splash and some under-the-radar gems worth seeking out:

Undermajordomo Minor, by Patrick DeWitt

The publisher’s copy calls it “a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behaviour,” which is a siren song for the likes of me. There is a castle and a baron involved in this tale of a badly-behaved misfit who hopes to reform himself in a house of the rich. The gothic elements are likely to be accompanied with humor; DeWitt was shortlisted for the Booker, of course, in 2011 for his very funny (and very dark) The Sisters Brothers. We don’t get enough capering in literary novels lately, it seems, but this is the sort of book where one character will ask another, “Are you in the midst of an intrigue?”

Undermajordomo Minor is published 15 September by Ecco

The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli

The novel opens with a list of boasts from its protagonist, Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez. Among them: “I can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums. I can interpret Chinese fortune cookies.” Training as an auctioneer, Highway hopes these and other skills will help him find the perfect set of teeth. If that sounds like an odd plot, I can only promise you that things get delightfully odder. Already out from Granta in the UK for several months now, Luiselli’s novel arrives in the United States from tiny Coffee House Press with considerable momentum behind it.

The Story of My Teeth is published 15 September by Coffee House Press

Chelsea Girls, by Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles is a legendary poet, known for chronicling. This book is technically a re-issue, having first been published by tiny Black Sparrow Press in 1994. Myles’s “autobiographical fiction” tells the story of her upbringing and her early years in New York among poets and artists. Her work is hard to describe, best encountered on its own terms; suffice to say it combines frankness and beauty in a truly original way. The New York Times, reviewing it, called Chelsea Girls “like the product of a collaboration between Ernest Hemingway and Lynda Barry”. People who enjoyed Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts this year are also bound to like this; Myles is one of Nelson’s great influences.

Chelsea Girls is published 19 September by Ecco

Gold Fame Citrus, by Claire Vaye Watkins

Post-apocalyptic settings are something of the new black in literary fiction, not that they’ve ever truly gone out of vogue, thanks in no small part to Margaret Atwood (who, by the way, will have another of these appear on 29 September with The Heart Goes Last). Watkins, whose short story collection Battleborn made serious waves in 2012 and was named as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, will bring her own original spin to the genre. She chooses water as the scarce resource and southern California as the location of her book, which seems a perhaps unintentionally timely choice.

Gold Fame Citrus is published 29 September by Riverhead

The Tsar of Love and Techno, by Anthony Marra

This collection of linked short stories from the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena treads much of the same ground as the novel – specifically Chechnya. But given how addictive the prose was in Constellation, where Marra was lyrical but also drover quickly, those who loved the John Leonard Prize winner a couple of years back are certainly hungering for more. I read this collection in a single sitting the night it arrived on my doorstep, entranced by the plot, which unfurls from a Soviet-era effort to erase all of Stalin’s enemies from art. “I am an artist first, a censor second,” it begins, and the contradictions inherent in that statement will carry you through the whole book.

The Tsar of Love and Techno is published 6 October by Knopf

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg

The mere sale of this novel – for a reported $2m, following hard upon news that it had been optioned by the movie producer Scott Rudin – caused a kind of sensation in bookish circles. The writer, Hallberg, was chiefly known as a literary critic before this, writing for the American literary website the Millions about, among other things, “difficult novels”. Its 944 pages are set in the summer of 1977 in New York, when punk reigned and a blackout was looming, and is told by multiple viewpoints. Early readers and reviewers have been lavish in their praise for the novel’s ambitions and likened it to the “doorstopper” work of Wallace, DeLillo and Pynchon. Expect arguments about this – and about the $2m – to be unavoidable once the book actually gets into reader hands. We may soon be making neologisms of Hallberg’s name, too.

City on Fire is published on 13 October by Knopf