The season of Authors begins

In Manhattan in the early spring, it is not only the small, white flowers of the Bradford pear-trees that come into bloom on city streets. No, more aggressively and with less subtlety, it is the Author that proliferates. This species will overwhelm all others. The spring publishing-season is upon us.

Their new books will be out any moment now; publicists are girding themselves to deal with the divas among them, and hotel rooms across the country are being reserved as plans gestate for this army of - to use the term with a certain absence of discrimination - writers, as they are dispatched to bookstores and cafes around the country. Readings shall be held, conversations had, psyche plumbed, literary merit debated, friendships ended, the wars of competition and envy begun.

With the business of publishing increasingly a business, a hardhearted trade of goods and services aimed at expanding little more than profit-margin and share-price, these are testy times indeed. The biggest book of the season is expected to be Monica's Story, the autobiographical saga of intrepid young Monica Lewinsky, penned by British author and Princess Diana chronicler Andrew Morton. Lewinsky is said to have received some $600,000 as an advance. She is also set to get another $600,000 from British and European tabloids as she embarks on her author-tour this week.

But of course this is not "literature", and no one argues that it is. Still, this is, as it were, at least publishing - literature is not overly represented in the field charged with printing actual books and making them available to people. The New York Times best-seller list is dominated with middle-brow fare, featuring novels by John Grisham and Patricia Cornwall and Dean Koontz and Jonathan Kellerman. The non-fiction side of the list offers little hope; two of the top 10 are written by US television prime-time news anchors (Tom Brokaw of NBC and Peter Jennings of ABC), another by comedian Al Franken . . . and an especially wonderful title (Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever) by former New York city judge Judy Scheindlin.

And so it falls to the denizens of Manhattan, the intellectuals who huddle here, resolute in their camaraderie, their unity against the Stupidification of America, to listen to and to buy the authors who would sell something else - the authors who aim higher than mere entertainment, mere amusement of the masses. Because before the national book-tours get seriously underway, the serious authors read their works in New York city. It is here, where the opinion-makers are, where the weathermen of the cultural climate reside, that first impressions count.

New York in the spring is a cocktail party: what the author is wearing, what she says, how he looks, counts.

This week is a banquet. Helen Vendler, eminent Shakespeare scholar, speaks about Yeats's poem, The Wild Swans at Coole; Tom Wolfe weighs in at Fordham University about his new novel, A Man in Full; Wendy Wasserstein, playwright, and author Harold Evans (the former Random House chief who is married to Tina Brown) debate the role of history in fiction, film and theatre. It is that kind of week, a week that looks as though publishing is trying to out-programme Monica Lewinsky.

And so, also in the midst of this, we have Susan Sontag, debuting her new novel In America and Lewis Lapham, editor of the venerable Harper's magazine, plugging his new, non-fiction work, a 67-page book called The Agony of Mammon - The Imperial Global Economy Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland. Neither Sontag nor Lapham could be further away, in both persona and product, from the usual hype and fluff that characterise much of the literary output of the season. And yet neither is an obscure writer toiling in unrecognised shade, and Sontag is inarguably a genuine celebrity.

She is also rarely thought of as a novelist. The 800 or so people who turned out to hear her at the 92nd Street venue on Monday night came to see a woman famous as the leading American "new intellectual". After entering the University of California at Berkeley at the age of 15 in 1948, Sontag attended Harvard and the University of Paris. She made her literary debut in 1963 with a novel called The Benefactor that was immediately forgotten. Instead, it was a 1968 book of essays and criticism called Against Interpretation that put Sontag on the map.

Subsequent books - Styles of Radical Will, On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor, won numerous awards and set Sontag up as a radical and substantive thinker, an American who appropriated the best of ancient and modern European culture and thought and reinterpreted it in the American idiom. Hers was a dominant voice in the 1960s and 1970s.

She was also glamorous and beautiful, with a streak of white through her dark hair. Such things never hurt.

AS if to suggest that the 1990s defy interpretation, Sontag has abandoned non-fiction and now concentrates on writing novels, with mixed success. Her new work, from which she read on Monday and which is set for release later this year, is the tale of a Polish actress and her lover set in America in 1870. It is, to listen to it, dense, and many in the audience seemed distracted, wishing for an opportunity to talk with Sontag about contemporary culture. No such opportunity was presented. After an hour of reading Sontag thanked the audience and abruptly departed the stage.

It was a very different scene at Posman's Books in Greenwich Village, where Lapham held court for about 50 listeners crowded into the store. As the editor of Harper's, a monthly magazine that is widely considered among the best in America, Lapham is a satirist who skews institutions and government and his fellow writers. He has published several books of essays on topics ranging from the US presidential elections to social economics.

It was an invitation last January to participate in the World Economic Forum, hosted annually by billionaire George Soros in Davos, Switzerland, that produced Lapham's latest work. Organised as a club for corporations with cash-flows of at least $1 billion a year and graced with chief executive who take an interest in world affairs, the Davos conference is widely considered a gathering of the world's most powerful people. They talk, attend sessions on topics such as capitalism in Russian markets, and constitute, in the words of the correspondent for London's Financial Times, roughly 70 per cent of the world's daily output of self-congratulation.

Lapham skewers them mightily, and he soon had his listeners laughing. After reading, he entertained questions, and took the opportunity to offer criticisms about contemporary culture.

There has to be a guiding principal in society other than The Market, he said, because the market does not have values. The Market does not have a mind. With that Lapham, surrounded by displays of his books, signed copies for those purchasing his latest, and was off into the night.

The season has just begun.