Mary Roach is my hero. First she wowed me with Stiff, an exploration of dead bodies and what happens to them. Then she gave me goosebumps with Spook, a scientific look at the afterlife.

And now? Now she’s forged into what is, perhaps, science’s true final frontier. No, not space. Sex. (Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, 319 pages, $25, W.W. Norton & Company.)

Roach, a fearless and often self-deprecatingly klutzy reporter, traces the recorded history of sex research and condenses much of it down into the more entertaining — and unbelievable — bits. She pores over reports, and visits scientists and doctors all over the world to gain insight into their life’s work, which she finds is often done just this side of the brink of financial and cultural peril (take Dr. Ahmed Shafik, who must try to find research subjects in Egypt, a Muslim country that you could fairly describe as sexually repressed). Most governments don’t like to spend a lot of money on sex research, and sex researchers have to contend with the fact that many people just assume that they are voyeuristic pervs just waiting for the chance to observe test subjects going at it.

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The writer spends his life in a solitary landscape of desk, typewriter and window through which he gazes out at the world to recharge his creative battery.

At least he used to.

Now, it’s probably more Mac, Starbucks and iPod. Nevertheless, writing is a solo and, mostly, lonesome pursuit. Paul Auster pours this feeling of seclusion out onto paper and into novels populated by rich, though solitary, characters.

In his latest, “Man in the Dark,” (Henry Holt and Co., $23) 72-year-old August Brill has recently moved in with his daughter and granddaughter after an accident that has left him somewhat incapacitated.

The house is one of sadness and loss, his granddaughter Katya having lost her boyfriend less than a year earlier to a horrific crime, the details of which we get in only the last few pages of the book.

Brill and Katya spend hours upon hours each day watching and discussing movies to move the time along and redirect their emotions. Brill spends his sleepless nights lying awake in the dark, creating stories to forget Katya’s pain and the pain he feels at having lost his own wife not long before.

It is one of these stories (which takes up a majority of the novel) that we meet Owen Brick, a man who travels into an alternate world, an America where there is no 9/11 tragedy, yet one where a civil war has broken out after the chaos of the 2000 presidential election. Brick is sent to this alternate America to take his instructions; to be sent back to his own world to kill the man who has developed the story of the civil war in his mind, to kill a man he’s never met, a man named August Brill. The intricate tale touches reality, the author asking for death from his subconscious.

“Man in the Dark” is reminiscent of Auster’s previous book, “Travels in the Scriptorium.” In fact, it almost seems as if the latter was a writing exercise for the former, that was accidentally published.

Both are good reads, though not breezy beach reading. They allow us into the artist’s mind to wrap ourselves in loneliness and despair, and to learn where fiction might find its origin. Reading Paul Auster can be a bit like watching sausage made, though in this instance we can’t help but devour the ingredients as we await the final product.

   “The Black Hand: A Barker & Llewelyn Novel,” by Will Thomas