NEW YORK—Just in time for an especially crowded fall, business seems to be picking up for books. Or at least declining less.

“I feel most people are cautiously optimistic, now that we seemed to have turned a corner,” says Simon & Schuster Inc. CEO Carolyn Reidy, who says the past two months have improved noticeably over a rough first half of 2009. “It’s not that we’re back to the extremely strong sales of more than a year ago, but we’re trending upward.”

“Cautious optimism, that’s the right phrase,” says Jonathan Burnham, publisher of the Harper imprint of HarperCollins, which had an especially poor second quarter of 2009. “One never knows when we’re completely out of the woods, but there’s a sense of gradual upward progress.”

The Association of American Publishers, which had been reporting declines for much of the year, finally had some good news, announcing a 21.5 percent sales increase for June. Barnes & Noble Inc., which has been hurt by online competition and discount stores, reported a 5 percent revenue drop for the three months ending Aug. 1, but expects a smaller decline in the fall.

After months when Stephenie Meyer seemed to be the only author anyone wanted to read, publishers and booksellers have noted new hits such as Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice,” Richard Russo’s “That Old Cape Magic” and Pat Conroy’s “South of Broad.”

“It’s still quite a difficult marketplace ... but there’s clearly a little bit more enthusiasm,” John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, says. “In the first six months, you basically had just the Stephenie Meyer books and a few others working. Now what you’re seeing is a broader spectrum working better.”

If the fall is a bust, Sargent says, blame it on the economy. It would be hard to blame the industry for failing to offer anything to buy.

Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol,” his first novel since “The Da Vinci Code,” is just the start. New fiction is due from Richard Powers, Alice Munro, E. L. Doctorow, Diane Gabaldon, Stephen King, John Grisham, Audrey Niffenegger, Jonathan Lethem and Lorrie Moore.

Other highlights: Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Lacuna,” Ha Jin’s “A Good Fall,” Wally Lamb’s “Wishing and Hoping,” essay collections by Chinua Achebe and Zadie Smith, and a memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon. Novels are coming from Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and perennial Nobel candidate Philip Roth.

The top nonfiction book is Sen. Ted Kennedy’s “True Compass,” the most anticipated work ever by or about a Kennedy, especially in light of his recent death from brain cancer. Kennedy, a key supporter of Barack Obama’s presidency, will likely be featured in another major release: former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s “The Audacity to Win.” Taylor Branch’s “The Clinton Tapes” draws upon conversations between Branch and then-President Bill Clinton; David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster calls it “the most intimate portrait of Bill Clinton’s presidency that we’ve had.”

Capt. Chesley Sullenberger reflects on his miraculous landing in the Hudson River in “Highest Duty,” while Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory” looks into the death in Afghanistan of former football star Pat Tillman. Former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson gives his take on last fall’s financial meltdown in “On the Brink.”

Religious books include Elie Wiesel’s “Rashi,” a biography of the 11th-century French Talmudic scholar; “You Were Born for This” by Bruce Wilkinson, author of “The Prayer of Jabez”; Robert Alter’s translation of the Book of Psalms; and “Reading Jesus” by Mary Gordon. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins takes on creationism in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Jane Hannon, co-owner of Bank Square Books in Mystic, Conn., expects Suzanne Collins’ “Catching Fire” to be a big seller. It is the second in Collins’ “Hunger Games” series, which features televised competitions to the death of young people representing districts of a futuristic United States. The books “appeal to boys and to girls, and to sixth-graders all the way up to high school,” Hannon says.

The rich and the famous again will be with us. Michael Feeney Callan’s “Robert Redford” is an authorized biography of the actor-director-film patron. Mitchell Zuckoff’s “Robert Altman” is an oral biography featuring interviews with Warren Beatty, Tim Robbins and the director, who died in 2006. Among other celebrity books are memoirs by tennis great Andre Agassi, actors Tony Curtis and Leslie Caron, David Letterman sideman Paul Shaffer and rock stars Steven Tyler and Clarence Clemons.

Ben Yagoda considers the whole genre in “Memoir: A History.” Yagoda, whose previous books include biographies of Will Rogers and The New Yorker magazine, noted that even reality star Kathy Griffin has a memoir out this fall, an event that might have been deemed blasphemous in the early years of celebrity books.

“It used to be that you had to be someone like Charlie Chaplin, who was the greatest movie star of his time,” Yagoda said. “Or a golfer like Bobby Jones. And now you have the D-list, like Kathy Griffin. And she’s not even the least celebrated of the celebrity memoirists.”

Thanks to the film “Julie & Julia,” Julia Child is again the country’s most popular cookbook writer and her longtime editor, Judith Jones, has a memoir out about her own love of food.

Some of the most notable books are by authors no longer around to discuss them.

An unpublished work by Michael Crichton, an unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov and unedited short stories by Raymond Carver are coming. Also, a reissue of Michael Jackson’s memoir “Moonwalk” and a deluxe coffee-table edition about the late singer; short fiction by Kurt Vonnegut; authorized sequels to A. A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” and Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”; the posthumous completion of a memoir by George Carlin and of a Robert Jordan novel, “The Gathering Storm,” the first of a planned trilogy that will wrap up his “Wheel of Time” series.

“There’s a certain reopening to the mystery of authorship and to a sense of understanding of where the work came from and how it re-emerged after an author’s death,” says Burnham of Harper, which is publishing Crichton’s “Pirate Latitudes” in November. “It’s also an occasion to revisit an author’s work when you thought that work was complete.”

“It seems to me that another part of doing honor to an author who is no longer with us is knowing when to write ‘The End’ and cease the production of work in his world,” said Jordan’s widow and editor, Harriet McDougal. “It was abundantly clear to me that he wanted the series to be finished; if it had not been clear, I would never have undertaken this work.”