The Best Books We’ve Read in 2024 So Far

• 
  Disrupted City

  by Manan Ahmed Asif (New Press)

  Nonfiction

  In this engaging book, a professor of South Asian history invites readers to take a walk with him through Lahore, the city of his birth. As he winds past monuments and bazaars—evoking a rich cast of characters who have called Lahore home for more than a millennium—he contemplates how this ancient city has changed since Partition, in 1947. Muslim families like his settled into the homes of displaced Sikhs and Hindus as part of a calamity that remade the population by forcing people “to move without much, to put down shallow roots, to remember even less.” But, as Asif demonstrates, walking through a city can be an act of remembering its past.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Flint Kill Creek

  by Joyce Carol Oates (The Mysterious Press)

  Fiction

  In this collection of twelve stories, in which relationships swerve disastrously off course, people aren’t as one thought they were, and seemingly bucolic landscapes turn sinister, Oates carefully threads strands of mystery and evil through the quotidian. As she said in a Q. & A. for the magazine, she considers “mystery to be the genre that most closely approximates our experiences as individuals.” One of the stories, “Late Love,” first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Q&A

  by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)

  Nonfiction

  Structured as a series of answers to questions from readers, this book, by a noted graphic novelist, is part advice manual for aspiring cartoonists, part memoir. Tomine, who taught himself to draw as a “defense against chaos and loneliness,” started self-publishing at sixteen, and he has worked steadily for nearly thirty years now. He reflects candidly and wittily on topics including the solitary nature of cartooning, writing to artist idols, parenthood’s influence on his art, and adapting a graphic novel into a screenplay (“Shortcomings”). His writing, by turns encouraging and nostalgic, is interspersed with life-drawing sketches and with panels from his graphic novels.

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Books & Fiction



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• 
  The Brothers Grimm

  by Ann Schmiesing (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  This is the first major English-language biography of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in decades, and it’s hearty German fare. Schmiesing traces the “riches to rags to riches” trajectory of their lives, situating it, along with their creative output, in an ever-evolving historical context. Born in 1785 and 1786, respectively, Jacob and Wilhelm came of age during a time when the outlines of their homeland shifted repeatedly, with the Napoleonic invasion of their native state of Hessen, in 1806, the Congress of Vienna and post-Napoleonic redivisions of Europe, and, eventually, the rise of Otto von Bismarck. For the Grimms, there could be no greater treasure than that of a German nation-state, and, believing that shared cultural traditions could actualize this dream, they set about collecting fairy tales. Aware, much like the brothers, that every story is one of enchantment and disenchantment, Schmiesing grapples with the commitment to authenticity that undergirded their work, and also its later appropriation by ethno-nationalist ideologies. In so doing, she demonstrates how the nation is at once humanity’s most cherished fairy tale, and its grimmest.

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  Read more: “The Brothers Grimm Were Dark for a Reason,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  Model Home

  by Rivers Solomon (MCD x FSG)

  Fiction

  “Being well versed in the specific tropes of a genre should save me from worry, but knowledge has never saved anyone”—so observes Ezri, the Oxford-educated, nonbinary narrator of Solomon’s novel, which adapts the conventions of haunted-house fiction. After their parents—onetime paragons of “Black Excellence”—meet a grisly death in the affluent, white gated community in Texas where their family once lived, Ezri is summoned back to their childhood home, a place they have long regarded as haunted. As Ezri and their sisters parse supernatural horrors from earthbound ones, Solomon succeeds in evoking an atmosphere in which there is more than one way to feel haunted.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Letters

  by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  A new collection, edited by Kate Edgar, gathers the prolific, ebullient letters of the late British neurologist and longtime New Yorker contributor. An excerpt, focussing on his musings about the remarkable effects of a new drug to treat patients with encephalitis lethargica in the late sixties and on the writing of his 1973 book, “Awakenings,” appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Canoes

  by Maylis De Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore (Archipelago)

  Fiction

  This stylish collection opens with a narrator getting her jaw molded while a dentist shows her a photo of “a human jawbone from the mesolithic,” an image that establishes the oral and historical fixations that give de Kerangal’s mostly plotless stories their energy. A deep sensitivity to language elevates the mundanity of these narrators’ lives: one listens to radio static and feels that she is “crossing another dimension of reality in a breaststroke, immersed in the crackling of electromagnetic waves.” In another story, a narrator is asked to recite and record a poem by mysterious sisters who have undertaken “a monumental work that aimed to restore to literature its oral aspect, to embody it, to give each text a voice all its own, the right one”—a project not dissimilar to de Kerangal’s.

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Last Week’s Picks

• 
  The Barn

  by Wright Thompson (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Thompson, who was born into an old Mississippi planter family, grew up only miles from the barn where Emmett Till was tortured and killed. This book is not only a retelling of the crime—a story that Till’s family, among others, has already published—but also a rich and wandering history of the township in which Till died: the few square miles of plantations that helped birth both the blues and the Ku Klux Klan. Thompson writes movingly of more than one “enormous web of interconnected people” in the Delta, and of the ongoing fight to commemorate its lynchings. He brings a local’s intensity to the project: the book is as much about his neighbors, and even his kin, as it is about his country.

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• 
  When the Ice Is Gone

  by Paul Bierman (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This scientific history recounts the drilling, in the nineteen-sixties, of the world’s first deep ice core—a cylinder of ice that extended more than four thousand feet below the surface. Efforts like this one contributed to the creation of a new scientific discipline. By analyzing the dust, ash, oxygen isotopes, and air bubbles preserved in ice cores, scientists could now reconstruct the history of Earth’s climate. In 2019, Bierman, a geologist, and his team discovered plant fragments in the frozen soil collected from the base of the core—evidence that Greenland’s ice sheet had melted before, under climatic conditions similar to today’s. Unless we curb climate change, he writes, “the island will be green again.”

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• 
  Playing Possum

  by Susana Monsó (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  What do animals understand about death? That is the animating question of Monsó’s début book, in which readers encounter stories like that of a Tonkean macaque who refuses to put down the body of her dead baby and a dog that consumes the face of its deceased owner. It’s hard to engage with such anecdotes without anthropomorphizing their subjects. But Monsó shows that such accounts may be less straightforward than they seem. In order to lend some precision to an otherwise story-driven and sentimental subject, Monsó proposes a stripped down definition of death, one predicated on irreversibility and non-functionality, and rigorously applies it to an entire menagerie of creatures. The result not only expands our understanding of other animals but sheds light on our own intellectual and emotional relationship to mortality. How much, she implicitly asks, can any living being truly grasp about what it means to die?

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  Read more: “What Do Animals Understand About Death?,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Bright I Burn

  by Molly Aitken (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Inspired by a real woman, Alice Kyteler, who was born in the thirteenth century and accused of witchcraft, this gripping novel follows its protagonist from her youth in Kilkenny, as the captivating daughter of an innkeeper and lender, to her old age, hiding out as a priest in England. In between, Alice takes over her father’s business; is struck by lightning; marries four times, each with violent ends; births two children; and amasses significant wealth. “I am a rare case,” she says, of her story. “Once brightly I burned, I drew them all to me and consumed them all, unwittingly and wittingly, in my fire.”

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• 
  Gifted

  by Suzumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell (Transit)

  Fiction

  In this unsentimental novella, a young woman working as a bar hostess and sex worker in Tokyo reckons with several unresolved personal traumas in the course of a few weeks. Her mother, an unsuccessful poet, is dying—first at her daughter’s house, in the entertainment district, then in the hospital. The unfortunate circumstances force the unnamed protagonist to reflect on the abuse she endured at her mother’s hands, as well as on the recent deaths of two of her friends. Based on Suzuki’s own experiences in the adult industry, the book chronicles the young woman’s wanderings from bar to bar, hospital to home, with brutal honesty. “This district is rife with women walking around with two million yen,” the character remarks. “Nearly the same number who say they want to die.”

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Previous Picks

• 
  From Our Pages

  Patriot

  by Alexei Navalny (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  In 2020, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny was poisoned at the hands of the F.S.B. During his recovery, Navalny began writing his memoir, “Patriot”; he continued to keep a diary after he was arrested and imprisoned in the “special regime” colony known as Polar Wolf, north of the Arctic Circle. Writing throughout his captivity, until his death in February, 2024, he recounts his political career, details the harsh conditions of his confinement, and implores the Russian people to “not lose the will to resist.” The book was excerpted in the magazine.

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• 
  The Irish Republican Brotherhood 1914–1924

  by John O’Beirne Ranelagh (Irish Academic Press)

  Nonfiction

  The Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in the late nineteenth century, was a secret society devoted to the establishment—through violent rebellion—of an independent Ireland. Its members included prominent figures such as Michael Collins, who was also the director of intelligence for the I.R.A. This comprehensive history focusses on a tumultuous decade that comprised the Irish War of Independence, the wrangling over the treaty that partitioned Ireland, and the civil war fought between Irish republicans and the British-backed government of the newly created Irish Free State. Ranelagh offers an illuminating study of how the I.R.B. weighed revolutionary idealism against political realism—a negotiation whose compromises are still playing out in Ireland today.

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• 
  The Third Realm

  by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

  This novel, part of an ongoing series, follows a loosely connected group of people as they navigate premonitions of doom that result from the sudden appearance of a bright new star. Despite suggestions of the supernatural (one subplot centers on a heavy-metal band implicated in human sacrifice), expectations of horror are not borne out. Instead, the book is full of the prosaic events for which its author is known. Protracted descriptions of drinking coffee or shopping at a grocery store are interspersed with philosophical musings about the search for meaning, which, when mixed with the uncanny, become genuinely unsettling.

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• 
  The Propagandist

  by Cécile Desprairies, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer (New Vessel)

  Fiction

  Who among us can truly claim immunity when the past comes calling? Desprairies’s “The Propagandist,” which was published in France in 2023 and long-listed for that year’s Prix Goncourt, is a case in point. Deftly translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, this début novel offers a thoroughgoing inventory of French complicity with the crimes of Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. Desprairies, a historian of Vichy France, focusses on a single French clan, modelled after her own family. The narrator is a historian of the author’s generation who recalls the characters who peopled her upper-middle-class, nineteen-sixties Parisian childhood. Some were mere “second-and-third-degree collaborators” during the war, content to look the other way and pursue their own advantage as Jews were systematically “relieved” of their property and positions in French society. Others, such as the narrator’s mother, Lucie—the novel’s central figure—were true believers in the Nazi cause. “The Propagandist” follows the narrator’s efforts to understand and come to grips with this malignant legacy. The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation.

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  Read more: “The Mordant Intimacy of Cécile Desprairies’s “The Propagandist”,” by Leslie Camhi
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Use of Photography

  by Annie ErnauxMarc Marie, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories)

  Nonfiction

  In early 2003, while Ernaux was undergoing invasive treatment for breast cancer, she embarked on a passionate affair with a new man, Marc Marie. The mornings after their nights together, they’d wake to “the devastated landscape that remains after lovemaking”: clothes and shoes scattered haphazardly, papers knocked to the floor, dishes in disarray. There was a beauty and a mystery to the disorder, and Ernaux and Marie began to photograph these scenes, creating a silent record of their relationship. Later, they chose a selection of images to write about, and together produced this diary of a complicated year. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

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• 
  Good Reasonable People

  by Keith Payne (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  In America, it is now a common experience to find that an ordinary, likable person holds views that you deem disagreeable, or even disturbing. Often, we attribute this to the forces of polarization. But Payne, a professor of psychology, believes that the problem is deeper. Studies have shown that our political beliefs tend to be fairly shallow; few of us hold positions that are consistent or coherent over time. What we do share is a “psychological bottom line”: the conviction that we are “good and reasonable people.” In order to maintain a stable, positive sense of ourselves, Payne writes, we constantly rationalize, bending new facts toward a familiar conclusion—that we are good, and those who disagree with us are bad. Payne isn’t saying that politics is an illusion, or that Democratic and Republican policies are indistinguishable. But he does think that psychological drama, not political disagreement, is at the root of our national turmoil.

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  Read more: “Do They Really Believe That Stuff?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

  by Rhodri Lewis (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  This engaging study seeks to understand the “engine” driving Shakespeare’s tragedies, noting that no formal template binds “Hamlet” to, say, “Julius Caesar” or “Coriolanus.” Lewis finds common threads in the plays’ inner workings, most notably a delicate, calculated interplay between plot and personality. The tragic events that befall Shakespeare’s characters arise not from fate but from the characters’ feelings and thoughts—their delusions and the choices that those delusions lead them to make. Ultimately, Lewis writes, the aim of Shakespeare’s tragedies is not to moralize or to pronounce but to make audiences reflect on “human thought as an ineradicably emotional phenomenon.”

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• 
  The Book of George

  by Kate Greathead (Henry Holt)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this comic novel is George, a millennial with vague writerly aspirations, who sustains his aimless life style by drawing on family connections and his girlfriend’s trust fund. His kind impulses are hampered by a lack of self-awareness: the day a moving truck is scheduled to arrive at his mother’s house, he unpacks her kitchenware to cook her an elaborate breakfast. As his girlfriend cleans his childhood bedroom while he plays with his old Game Boy, he says, “It’s not right.” The women in George’s life, who bear the brunt of his self-absorption, confront him with his egotism in occasional moments of clarity—but whether they can cure him, this wry story suggests, is less clear.

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• 
  Dear Dickhead

  by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Despentes’s titular dickhead is a middle-aged novelist named Oscar Jayack, who finds himself on the wrong end of the #MeToo movement—in France, #BalanceTonPorc, or “squeal on your pig”—when his former publicist, Zoé Katana, outs him as a harasser on her blog. Zoé’s righteous fury is electric, and Despentes compellingly presents her as a casualty of male privilege. As for Oscar, there’s no doubt that his conduct was a textbook case of workplace harassment. And yet, he’s more pathetic than vicious, and far from “the big macho author” Zoé makes him out to be. Despentes, one of France’s most prominent feminist authors, has spoken up in support of #MeToo and been open about her own experience with sexual violence. Here, though, she’s less interested in revenge on the patriarchy than in recovery from its harms. “Dear Dickhead” is about the quiet, behind-the-scenes work of personal growth, which doesn’t always happen in a straight line. It is, in many ways, a sentimental book, forbearing toward its characters and essentially optimistic about the human capacity to change for the better.

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  Read more: “Rage, Revenge, and Recovery Battle It Out in Virginie Despentes’s #MeToo Novel,” by Anahid Nersessian
• 
  Undivided

  by Hahrie Han (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Han, a political scientist, has previously written academic books and big-idea books, but her latest is a short, sensitive account of four congregants in a single church in Cincinnati. Crossroads is one of the largest in the country, with more than thirty-five thousand weekly in person attendees. In 2015, it created a racial-justice course in which small, diverse groups committed themselves to weeks of discussion; Han spent years talking to participants, using their experience to narrate the story of evangelical Christianity more broadly. Four, of course, is a mustard seed compared with the more than two hundred million Americans who identify as Christian, and Han makes no claim for statistical significance. She does, however, make a bolder claim about how the statistical insignificance of her subjects—as joiners in an age of social isolation, as Christians with a passion for racial justice, as interracial collaborators striving for mutual understanding—just might be relevant to the rest of us.

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  Read more: “The Megachurch That Tried to Confront Racism,” by Casey Cep
• 
  From Our Pages

  Highway Thirteen

  by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  The stories in this collection all revolve around the crimes of a serial killer, though the killer himself is never a main character, and the murders are not described in detail. Instead, each story features characters whose lives he touched or took: neighbors, acquaintances of his victims, podcasters chasing a sensational story. As McFarlane says, “The book isn’t about why serial killers do what they do; it’s about the ripple effects in the lives of people who are one or two or five or fifty steps removed from those horrors.” Two of the twelve stories, including “Hostel,” first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  The Hidden Globe

  by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  Abrahamian takes readers on a vivid, revelatory, and politically unpredictable tour of the present-day network state, which she defines as an “invisible firmament that binds a most unlikely collection of places.” Since roughly the Second World War, she writes, sovereignty has figured out ways to sell its perks on the international market. Enterprising governments are wont to leverage their commercial faculties, hawking “something as sweeping as laws and as petty as stamps; as primeval as land and as functional as a phone number.” The book ranges beyond obscured transactions and nested shell companies to much weirder patterns of jurisdictional flexibility, and its scrutiny takes in the businesses that exploit these workarounds, as well as the states that purvey them. But “The Hidden Globe” is more than a political jeremiad. Abrahamian demonstrates interest in the actual people who designed the architecture of these liminal bailiwicks, and she is careful to point out that there are plenty of instances in which legal exemptions served righteous purposes.

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  Read more: “Sovereignty for Sale,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
• 
  Lovely One

  by Ketanji Brown Jackson (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  Learning how to be, or become, Ketanji Brown Jackson was no mean feat. In her new memoir, Jackson, who joined the Supreme Court in 2022, writes that she was “fiercely” competitive in high school, skipping her commencement to take part in the National Catholic Forensic League championships. Her father, Johnny, a lawyer for the Miami-Dade school system, and her mother, Ellery, a teacher who became a high-school principal, pushed her to excel academically. “Lovely One” is, in some ways, most of all a parenting book. Jackson writes movingly about how her parents “instilled pride in our heritage, and faith in the future, in me,” and about raising her own daughters, the eldest of whom, Talia, was diagnosed with autism. Although Jackson doesn’t go into detail about her time on the Court, she does talk about the behind-the-scenes scrambling during her confirmation process. The transformation of prospective Justices’ Senate hearings into public ordeals means that almost any contemporary Justice’s memoir has room for a trauma plot. Jackson is gracious and refrains from score-settling, but makes it clear that her hearing—during which Republican senators intimated that she had supported terrorists when, as an assistant federal public defender, she represented Guantánamo detainees—was a wrenching slog.

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  Read more: “What Can Memoirs by Supreme Court Justices Teach Us?,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

• 
  The Burning Earth

  by Sunil Amrith (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In this expansive book, a historian places the earth’s ecological plight in the context of human exploitation. Amrith’s inventory of crucial events begins with the Charter of the Forest of 1217, which granted common people rights to England’s forests. Surveying gold-mining operations in South Africa and oil extraction in Baku, among other enterprises, Amrith recognizes the inseparability of environmental distress and political, economic, and social factors. As he recounts attempts by human beings to squeeze value out of natural resources, he also examines changing attitudes about our relationship to the natural world, which we have long regarded—erroneously, he argues—as separate from, rather than symbiotic with, our species.

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• 
  The Right to Oblivion

  by Lowry Pressly (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

  Pressly, a philosopher by training, offers a radiantly original contribution to a subject in need of new thinking. Privacy is often framed as our right to withhold sensitive information—a way to defend ourselves from digital intrusion or surveillance. Pressly is not opposed to reforms that would give us more power over our data, but it is a mistake, he writes, “to think that this is what privacy is for.” In his view, true privacy “protects against the creation of such information in the first place.” The goal should be to preserve “oblivion”—the fluid, ambiguous state in which human experience can’t be defined, much less converted into information, and that allows us to restore and remake ourselves.

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  Read more: “What Is Privacy For?,” by Ben Tarnoff
• 
  The Notebook

  by Roland Allen (Biblioasis)

  Nonfiction

  The profound cultural and intellectual impact of the notebook is the subject of this wide-ranging history, which traces the unassuming object’s development from ancient wax tablets to modern-day Moleskines. Through the centuries, notebooks and allied forms such as sketchbooks have been indispensable tools for merchants, writers, artists, scientists, and everyday people. Allen’s narrative moves fluidly as he recounts the evolution of the notebook’s use—touching on medieval trading routes and contemporary artist studios—and explores its role in both mundane tasks and world-changing innovations.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Sunday

  by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics)

  Fiction

  Schrauwen, a Belgian author and cartoonist, spent more than six years working on the graphic novel, which he serialized with the Berlin-based publisher Colorama. The story follows one character, Thibault, over the course of a single, uneventful Sunday in 2017. Readers encounter the intimate thoughts and neuroses that creep into Thibault’s mind as he contends with his own boredom. With the narrative’s shifts and repetitions, the passing day gives way to a sprawling, dreamlike meditation on time, memory, and consciousness. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Enlightenment

  by Sarah Perry (Mariner)

  Fiction

  This tale of faith and obsession, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, follows a pair of friends from an insular Baptist community in Essex, England. As one of them searches for a ghost that has haunted him since childhood, he becomes a rapturous student of physics and astronomy. “Occasionally it struck him that his love for the stars was no less a matter of faith than his remaining love for God,” Perry writes. Though the friends’ love stories form the novel’s heart, the book also navigates their attempts to find enlightenment beyond the boundaries of their community, as they question the binaries of goodness and sin, faith and doubt.

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• 
  Waiting for the Fear

  by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell (New York Review Books)

  Fiction

  The eight stories in this collection confirm Atay, who died in 1977, at the age of forty-three, as one of Turkey’s funniest, most enigmatic writers, a bard of the absurd. The typical Atay narrator is intelligent, brash, self-conscious, and male. He does not know what or who he is, and his self-estrangement is the source of the work’s drama. Often, he’s estranged from language, too: “words refused to describe me,” one character laments. Hubbell’s marvellous, restrained translation makes clear that the force of Atay’s fiction emerges from the tension between the purposive activity of his language and his narrators’ “state of vague revolt” against it. To read these stories is to be forcefully ushered into the home of a friend, to listen to him rant, yet to find his bizarre performance endearing, even lovable.

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  Read more: “The Bard of Turkish Alienation,” by Merve Emre
• 
  The Sequel

  by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon)

  Fiction

  In “The Plot,” the best-selling forerunner to this propulsive thriller, the novelist Jacob Finch Bonner dies by his wife’s hand, after becoming a literary star for having written a novel that—unbeknownst to him—is based on her grisly life story. That wife, Anna Williams-Bonner, is the quicksilver protagonist of this book, which follows her after she writes a novel of her own: ostensibly a roman à clef retelling of the events surrounding her husband’s suicide, it is in fact a cover for murder. The novel makes Anna a star, but her success is soon punctured by anonymous messages indicating that somebody knows the truth about Jacob’s source material. Korelitz spins Anna’s pursuit of her accuser into a satisfying hunt, threading it with her antihero’s hilariously jaundiced opinions of literary life.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Anthropologists

  by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury)

  Fiction

  A young couple, who live in a city far from both of their home countries and their families, is searching for an apartment to buy. In this subtle and resonant novel, which grew out of a story published in the magazine, Savaş charts the way we sometimes choose—and sometimes drift into—the path to our future.

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• 
  John Lewis

  by David Greenberg (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  Some biographers must wrestle with their subjects’ inconsistencies, but Greenberg, for the most part, has the opposite challenge in writing about the life of the late congressman. Lewis, who died in 2020, after serving thirty-three years in office, seems to have been a stubbornly straightforward character. Indeed, one of the most astonishing things about his life is how quickly he found his path, and how closely he hewed to it. During his first career, as an activist fighting Jim Crow, Lewis learned the importance of courage in the face of injustice. During his second, as a politician in Washington, he had to contend with the seeming mismatch between the soaring rhetoric of the civil-rights movement and the more earthbound reality of everyday politics. Attuned to this tension, Greenberg’s biography is appropriately weighty and admiring, but not hagiographic.

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  Read more: “How John Lewis Put a Legacy of Heroism to Use,” by Kelefa Sanneh
• 
  Clean

  by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  This tense and devilishly well-paced thriller is narrated by Estela, the housemaid of a wealthy couple in Santiago, Chile. Estela’s duties include cleaning, cooking, and—most important—taking care of the couple’s daughter; the novel consists of her recollection, delivered in an interrogation room, of the events leading up to the daughter’s untimely death. With increasing agitation, Estela relates the family’s dark dramas and her own mounting feelings of detachment, creating an outsider’s portrait of bourgeois unravelling, deftly entwined with reflections on class and oppression.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Paradise Bronx

  by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Fifteen years ago, Frazier set out to walk a thousand miles in the Bronx. His amiable ramble retraces the footsteps of five centuries, from George Washington exercising his horse on the site of the future Cross Bronx Expressway to President Jimmy Carter’s tour of the borough’s most burned-out blocks and the after-school wanderings of Sonya Sotomayor and Jennifer Lopez. With stops to note the birthplaces of hip-hop and Häagen-Dazs, he demonstrates the place’s essential and enduring in-betweenness. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

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• 
  Scaffolding

  by Lauren Elkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Two linked story lines drive this loosely plotted but finely etched début novel, which centers on two women who lived in the same apartment at different times. In contemporary Paris, Anna, a married psychoanalyst on leave after a miscarriage, befriends Clémentine, a young woman who unwittingly opens a door onto Anna’s past. In 1972, Florence, a feminist studying psychoanalysis and living in what will eventually become Anna’s apartment, wants a child; her husband doesn’t. As Anna and Florence separately puzzle over fidelity, desire, and Jacques Lacan, the novel hints that greater rewards come from intellectual quandaries than from the kind of certitude that defines the thinking of Clémentine, who, at one point, reduces fidelity to “a container for sex, to keep it from being too threatening.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  I Will Do Better

  by Charles Bock (Abrams)

  Nonfiction

  Three days before the third birthday of Bock’s daughter Lily, his wife died of leukemia, leaving Bock a widower and Lily motherless. This memoir is Bock’s account of—and reckoning with—the period that followed, when, as a self-described “overgrown, adult child,” he had to figure out how he was going to be the kind of parent that Lily needed over the next day or week or month, or sometimes just the next hour. Told with ten years’ hindsight, the book, which was excerpted on newyorker.com, is irresistibly candid about both grinding challenges and unexpected moments of joy.

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• 
  Do Something

  by Guy Trebay (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  This coming-of-age memoir is a love letter to nineteen-seventies New York, celebrating the creative tumult of the city “at a time when it was not at all unusual for people to shop around for the reality best suited to whatever story they happened to be telling.” Trebay, a longtime style reporter for the Times, peppers his story with reminiscences of his vibrant but troubled family, especially his huckster father and outlaw sister. The fondest passages concern his first steps as an eager but untrained journalist at Interview and the Village Voice, and his friendships with countercultural and literary figures, from Candy Darling to Jamaica Kincaid. Throughout, he testifies to an unbridled romance with “a city where the inexplicable is an everyday occurrence.”

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• 
  Abortion in the Age of Unreason

  by Warren M. Hern (Routledge)

  Nonfiction

  This memoir is partly a firehose of pure screed, demonstrating the radical commitment necessary to sustain a career under unique duress. Hern, who is eighty-six, is one of very few physicians in America who openly perform abortion in the second and third trimester. He received his first death threat two weeks after his clinic opened, in 1973, and has spent fifty years under constant harassment from people who view him as a mass murderer. His op-eds from the past several decades, republished exhaustively in the memoir, show Hern hitting the same notes over and over, warning of a future of draconian abortion regulation and pregnancy criminalization that has now come to pass. The book also provides an answer to the question that has tended to hover over his profession: What kind of person would choose this line of work? In Hern’s case: a hippie with a wife and child, who still takes great solace in hiking and skiing and wildlife photography, whose focus on reproductive medicine comes in part from decades of fieldwork in epidemiology and global health. One of the only regrets Hern mentions in the book is that he never made the time to study jazz piano under Ahmad Jamal, who once agreed to tutor him.

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  Read more: “Warren Hern, America’s Abortion Doctor,” by Jia Tolentino
• 
  Homeland

  by Richard Beck (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  The focus of this history of the war on terror is the war’s lingering cultural and political influence, which, its author argues, includes the deluge of Hollywood superhero films, a boom in S.U.V. sales, and the election of Donald Trump. Beck, a journalist, contends that the campaign was undertaken partly in an attempt to rescue “America’s declining power”—which it failed to do—and that “anti-Muslim bigotry had been baked into the war from the beginning.” Among the war’s legacies, he writes, are two failed states, increased surveillance within the U.S., a rise in police brutality, and the war in Gaza.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Sonny Boy

  by Al Pacino (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  The actor looks back at his hardscrabble childhood in the South Bronx in the nineteen-forties and fifties, his early days as an actor in downtown Manhattan, and his roles in such Hollywood classics as “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Godfather,” and “Scarface.” The book was excerpted in the magazine.

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• 
  Vox Ex Machina

  by Sarah A. Bell (M.I.T.)

  Nonfiction

  Bell’s début is a terrific account of how researchers gave machines voices, from signal compression through linear predictive coding and natural-language processing. Along the way, readers meet a young Alexander Graham Bell (no relation), who eagerly accepts his father’s challenge to build a talking machine, and Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, as he got his start as a cryptologist at Bell Labs. Bell also delves into the science behind everything from the electronic vocal tract (1950) and Speak & Spell (1978) to S.A.M., the Software Automatic Mouth (1982) and Siri (2011), examining all the mostly military-funded research that made each of these landmarks possible, down to talking bots.

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  Read more: “Is a Chat with a Bot a Conversation?,” by Jill Lepore
• 
  Elevator in Sài Gòn

  by Thuân, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyen An Lý (New Directions)

  Fiction

  The narrator of this ruminative novel, set in the early two-thousands, is a Vietnamese-language teacher living in Paris who returns to Vietnam for her mother’s funeral, where she discovers a photograph of a Frenchman in a hidden notebook. Searching for the man, she learns that her mother may have first met him in 1954, when she, a Communist, was captured by the French and he was among her interrogators. Threaded with observations about the nature of Vietnam’s colonial history and its aftermath, the novel is also an appraisal of memory and elision. As one character says, “cracks in our memory,” left untended, can “yawn open into abysses that devour all we once swore would be forever cherished in our mind.”

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• 
  Q

  by Craig Brown (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Queen Elizabeth II’s singular importance—constitutional, historical, psychological—is the subject of Brown’s book, which depicts the monumental figure at its center with magnanimous levity rather than with scrupulous reverence. In accordance with his métier as a columnist, Brown offers a series of approaches to the monarch from differing angles. His ear is exquisitely attuned to the hypocritical and the tone-deaf, as when he lists a variety of actions taken “as a mark of respect” during the week of national mourning that followed the Queen’s death. He is particularly interested in the ways in which the monarch, a familiar presence in the daily lives of so many for so long, also appeared unbidden in her subjects’ imaginative lives. “Q” is plausible evidence for the case that any book about the Queen is also a book about the realm and its populace—as well as that much larger sphere of non-subjects over whom she somehow still managed to reign.

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  Read more: “The Unrivalled Omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth II,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  Stolen Pride

  by Arlie Russell Hochschild (New Press)

  Nonfiction

  A deeply researched account of the rightward turn in Appalachia, this study focusses on Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city once flush with coal-mining jobs that sits in what is now America’s “whitest and second-poorest congressional district.” Hochschild, a sociologist, posits that Pikeville’s politics are shaped by grief about “stolen pride” and feelings of shame prompted by the region’s decline. She interviews a range of residents—including a mayor, prisoners, and recovering drug addicts—to understand each person’s relationship to these feelings. Some of her subjects experience “bootstrap pride”; others, like Matthew Heimbach, a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party, fashion themselves as moral outlaws.

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• 
  Charm

  by Julia Sonnevend (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Sonnevend, a sociologist at the New School, offers some useful clues about what makes a politician successful. In the past, she writes, we wanted such figures to be larger than life—to have charisma, an almost godlike quality that was evoked through authority and distance. Today, though, political life unfolds on smaller stages; we encounter politicians in a fragmented fashion, by scrolling through clips on TikTok and YouTube. The modern-day equivalent of charisma, therefore, is charm—an “everyday magic spell,” based on momentary glimpses of personality, that renders politicians “accessible, authentic and relatable in their quest for power.” The problem is that charm is fickle; as Sonnevend notes, it’s less an inherent quality than a reflection of our own search for authenticity.

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  Read more: “How Powerful Is Political Charm?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Concerning the Future of Souls

  by Joy Williams (Tin House)

  Fiction

  In this collection of vignettes centered on the angel Azrael, Williams flits through the moments before and after death. The young Azrael meets souls at the moment of their passing and shepherds them to what lies beyond. As he grapples with the nature of his trade and endures gentle ribbing from the older, more worldly-wise Devil, his earnest metaphysical musings create a current that charges Williams’s glittering, piecemeal requiem. The book is filled with humor, canny allusion, beauty, and a profundity born of glimpsing fleeting human lives from the outside—through eyes that have seen epochs yet nonetheless remain befuddled.

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• 
  Rejection

  by Tony Tulathimutte (HarperCollins)

  Fiction

  In this collection of linked short stories, the author of 2016’s “Private Citizens” gives loserdom its own rancid carnival. Tulathimutte understands the project—both his own and that of his characters—with diagnostic, comprehensive hyper-precision; as you behold his parade of marketplace failure and personal pathology, he’s ten steps ahead of any reaction you could muster. Thus, you simply surrender to the sick pleasure of watching humiliating people humiliate themselves, as when a clammy self-styled feminist ally gets shut down by a girl and goes, “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” while shaking his fists at the ceiling, then creates a dating profile that includes the line “Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan.” These are two of the mildest things to happen in this incredibly depraved book.

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  Read more: “A Story Collection About People Who Just Can’t Hang,” by Jia Tolentino
• 
  Taming Silicon Valley

  by Gary F. Marcus (M.I.T.)

  Nonfiction

  This polemic, by a cognitive scientist and startup founder, calls for stricter regulation of A.I. It begins with problems posed by generative A.I. (the kind that spits out text, images, and other data, and which currently fuels the largest A.I. companies’ businesses). These include misinformation, pornographic deepfakes, impersonation scams, and the use of publicly available material as training data, which Marcus equates to a “land grab.” His warnings are framed by critiques of A.I. development’s current direction, which has privileged deep learning over potentially more fruitful methods, and of what he argues is the tech industry’s moral decline.

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• 
  Be Ready When the Luck Happens

  by Ina Garten (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  It took canny business sense as well as abundant good fortune to become America’s reigning queen of tastefully deployed butterfat. As the title of her memoir suggests, Garten has an evolving understanding of her own success: she used to think that she was just lucky, she explains, but lately she’s begun to recognize the roles talent and hard work played. The book brings intimate new detail to the much-told story of Garten’s journey—from an office job in Washington to a prepared food store in the Hamptons, and from there to writing best-selling cookbooks and navigating TV stardom—including insight into her painful childhood and an account of the challenges in her seemingly idyllic marriage.

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  Read more: “Ina Garten and the Age of Abundance,” by Molly Fischer

• 
  Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

  by Katherine Bucknell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  A masterly biography of the author of “Goodbye to Berlin” and “A Single Man,” this book captures the intricacies of a fascinating, often contradictory character. Isherwood was an upper-class Englishman (he gained American citizenship in his forties) who genuinely loved people from all walks of life; a libertine turned Vedanta monk; a gay literary icon who didn’t come out publicly until his sixties. But, above all, as Bucknell shows, he was a tireless observer and recorder of people, places, and historical moments. When Isherwood died, in 1986, he left behind a vast personal archive—material that Bucknell uses to gently tease out themes that connect the author’s life to his art. Isherwood, she writes, “imagined a world in which he might be able to live differently”; through his work, he helped usher that world into being.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Intermezzo

  by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Two brothers, a one-time chess prodigy in his early twenties and a lawyer in his thirties, are mourning the death of their father and trying to make sense of who they are to each other—and to the women whom they might love. “Intermezzo,” Rooney’s subtle and powerful new novel, was excerpted in the magazine’s summer fiction issue.

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• 
  Life and Death of the American Worker

  by Alice Driver (One Signal)

  Nonfiction

  This intimately reported chronicle focusses on the migrant workers who staff Tyson Foods chicken plants in Arkansas. Their jobs, Driver reports, come with significant physical risks: they suffer from carpal-tunnel syndrome, chemical poisoning, and U.T.I.s (thanks to limited bathroom breaks). Because many workers process more than a hundred birds per minute, accidents are common: an average of twenty-seven workers a day are hospitalized, and some undergo amputations. According to Driver, Tyson intimidates workers who speak up, and the conditions at their plants devolved further during the pandemic. (Tyson representatives denied many of the claims in the book.)

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• 
  Our Evenings

  by Alan Hollinghurst (Random House)

  Fiction

  Hollinghurst’s fifth novel follows Dave Win, the son of a white British woman and a Burmese man. Although Dave never meets his father or learns much about his heritage, his foreign looks make him a bemusing presence in the Berkshire town where he grows up and in the élite institutions where he eventually studies. Hollinghurst writes movingly about Dave’s experience of British racism, evoking the humanity and inner life of someone often presumed to have neither. Meanwhile, we learn, in some detail, about Dave’s career in avant-garde theatre, his deepening emotional ties to his mother, and his relationships with various men. The book, despite narrative longueurs, contains moments of extraordinary beauty and powerful set pieces that demonstrate how much descriptions of sex—and Hollinghurst remains the great depixelator of carnality—can convey: distraction, estrangement, a fond attentiveness.

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  Read more: “Color, Class, and Carnality Collide in Alan Hollinghurst’s New Novel,” by Giles Harvey
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Empusium

  by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  In the Polish Nobel Prize winner’s first novel since the epic “Books of Jacob,” Mieczysław Wojnicz, a child in turn-of-the-century Galicia, grows up in a world of men. His mother is dead, and his father and his uncle, who believe that “the blame for both national disasters and educational failures lay with a soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness, mawkishness, and passivity,” force him constantly to prove his manliness—by braving a toad-ridden cellar or eating duck’s blood soup. He is also taken to many mysterious doctor’s appointments. Years later, as a young man, Mieczysław finds himself recovering from tuberculosis at a “health resort” in the mountains, where strange and sinister things begin to happen. Eventually, Mieczysław discovers the truth both about the town he’s in and about himself. An excerpt from the novel first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  The Sons of El Rey

  by Alex Espinoza (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  Encompassing three generations and two countries, this novel traces the lives of the men of the Vega family. As the patriarch, a former professional-wrestling star from Mexico, lies in hospice, the ghosts of his wife and his lucha libre persona force him to untangle his life’s defining relationships and failures. His son struggles to keep the Vegas’ gym, in Los Angeles, afloat amid the pandemic; his grandson, who is gay, totters between academic ambition and self-exploitation. The result is an affecting exploration of masculinity, familial and cultural inheritance, and the ways that love can be hidden and revealed.

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• 
  An Honest Woman

  by Charlotte Shane (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  Shane was twenty-one and a graduate student when she started selling private sex shows on a Web site called Flirt4Free, in the early two-thousands. Soon she began offering her clients erotic massage, and then “full service” work (meaning all-out penetrative and oral sex). In this memoir, which chronicles the nearly two decades Shane spent as a sex worker, she has little interest in sharpening the facts of her life to advance a political argument about the profession. Instead, she uses her experience as the basis for a sustained meditation on the misunderstandings that shadow male-female relations, whether paid for or not.

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  Read more: “What Charlotte Shane Learned from Sex Work,” by Lili Owen Rowlands
• 
  Mina’s Matchbox

  by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen B. Snyder (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  This beguiling coming-of-age novel, set in 1972, follows a twelve-year-old girl who goes to live for a year with her eccentric half-German uncle. The head of a beverage company, he resides with his family in coastal Japan, in a large house with grounds that once contained a zoo. The youngster bonds with her cousin, Mina, a beautiful but frail asthmatic girl who collects matchboxes and rides to school on her pet pygmy hippopotamus. The book is suffused with the transplant’s growing awareness of the ephemerality of her own innocence: “Even if you were born in a wonderful house like this,” she thinks, “you couldn’t just stay there, warm and cozy, for the rest of your life.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Final Cut

  by Charles Burns (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  Burns has a penchant for crafting images and stories that are both stylish and repulsive. The graphic novel follows Brian, a young artist and would-be filmmaker, and his attachment to Laurie, whom he recruits to play his film’s leading lady. It deploys themes of estrangement, fear of body processes, and the sudden apparition of extraterrestrials to express feelings of deep alienation and isolation. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Elise and the New Partisans

  by Dominique GrangeJacques Tardi, translated from the French by Jenna Allen (Fantagraphics)

  Fiction

  Tardi’s cartoonlike characters—depicted in realistic, harshly lit, black-and-white Parisian street settings—come to life as he draws on memories of the early activism of his longtime partner, the French singer Dominique Grange. The graphic novel follows a character named Elise, a stand-in for Grange, and recounts her political awakening and subsequent involvement in the protests that took place across France in May of 1968. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Health and Safety

  by Emily Witt (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  While chronicling her work as a journalist, her experiments with drugs and altered consciousness in the rave scene, and the cataclysmic events of the pandemic and ensuing lockdown, Witt, a staff writer, hauntingly captures an era in her life and in the life of the nation. Sections about the rise of youth activism, Beto O’Rourke’s Presidential campaign, a gun-rights rally in Virginia, and the return of New York’s club culture originally appeared in the magazine, where the riveting story of the end of a relationship was excerpted.

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• 
  How to Build a Fashion Icon

  by Law Roach

  Nonfiction

  Roach, a celebrity stylist, has worked with such clients as Céline Dion and Zendaya. In his new book, a memoir accessorized with tips for the Everywoman (and man) looking to dress like that girl, he writes about his childhood on the South Side of Chicago, his fashion influences, and what led to his decision to retire from full-time styling in 2023. Roach, who studied psychology in college, compares his initial meeting with a client to an “intake.” (Indeed, his first job out of school was doing intake at a mental-health facility.) “I can tell when to push someone out of their comfort zone, when to be more forceful with my vision, and when to pull back. That’s the psychologist’s training,” he writes.

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  Read more: “The Architect of Zendaya’s Red-Carpet Style,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  Twenty Years

  by Sune Engel Rasmussen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This foreign correspondent’s account of the two decades following the American invasion of Afghanistan uses a kaleidoscope of individual stories to portray how the country was “hollowed out” by “waste, fraud, price gouging, and profiteering.” Two subjects in particular come to the fore: Zahra, an Afghan refugee who returns from Iran after the Taliban is ousted; and Omari, a Talib, who is as motivated by religion as he is by the brutality of the U.S. military. As Rasmussen interweaves the war and his subjects’ stories, he shows how historical events intrude on the quotidian, and examines a foreign intervention in which, he writes, “lessons were rarely learned, mistakes often repeated.”

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• 
  Kingmaker

  by Sonia Purnell (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Purnell’s new biography of Pamela Harriman is something of a feminist reclamation project, bent on producing a respectful portrait of its subject, a Democratic power broker who, in her lifetime, was often derided for her sexual adventures. Born into the English aristocracy, in 1920, she married Randolph Churchill when she was nineteen. But it was his father, Winston, and his mother, Clementine, who saw in Harriman an uncanny ability to wield “power over older men.” They deployed her in a campaign of charm and seduction to help secure the Anglo-American alliance. When she married the magnate and statesman W. Averell Harriman, in 1971, she swiftly became an American citizen, a Washington fixture, and a prominent political fund-raiser. The Gorbachevs made a point of visiting her during their first trip to Washington, Nelson Mandela sought her counsel about getting votes, and Bill Clinton described her as “the First Lady of the Democratic Party.” Though there’s not a lot to support Purnell’s contention that Harriman was a woman of ideas, it’s clear that she liked to bet on winners, and that she was good at it.

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  Read more: “How a Mid-Century Paramour Became a Democratic Power Broker,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  The Wisdom of Sheep

  by Rosamund Young (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This meditative book reflects on more than four decades of living and working at Kite’s Nest, an organic farm in the Cotswolds, in England. Though Young acknowledges the “unremitting hard work” involved in farming, her anecdotes emphasize its pleasures: the welcome from her herd of sheep after she’s been away; the sight of a field full of frogs, signifying a healthy ecosystem. The farm’s cows, chickens, cats, and sheep “are all individuals with incredibly varied personalities.” Indeed, her stories show them to be subtly emotive—recalcitrant, helpful, blithe, astute. One hen, locked out of the house by mistake, leaps onto the windowsill “and pulls faces at me as I wash the dishes, forcing me to run to the door with profuse apologies.”

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• 
  Monet

  by Jackie Wullschläger (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Wullschläger, an art critic for the Financial Times, has written an Impressionist biography of the central Impressionist painter: a few key events appear in smudged glimpses, but the over-all shape of the life is clear, and every few chapters a nub of detail robs you of your breath. Monet often told interviewers half-truths, and he destroyed almost every letter he received. What Wullschläger shows, though, is that the artist was a relentless—and surprisingly business savvy—workhorse. He spent gruelling hunks of his twenties painting from five in the morning to eight in the evening; he conferred with his primary dealer about how to nudge up sales; he snubbed this dealer when he learned that a rival one could net him more money; and he completed something like two thousand paintings, not counting the hundreds he knifed apart.

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  Read more: “The Anguish of Looking at a Monet,” by Jackson Arn
• 
  How to Leave the House

  by Nathan Newman (Viking)

  Fiction

  This zippy novel takes place in the course of twenty-four hours on the day before the protagonist—a smart, self-centered, bisexual twenty-three-year-old—is meant to leave for university. The book alternates between chapters about the boy as he attempts to recover an important lost package and about the people he runs into along the way—an insecure ex-boyfriend, a cancer survivor, an elderly neighbor who has recently discovered a dark secret about her dead husband. Sprinkled throughout are wide-ranging cultural references—from Charlie Chaplin to broken phone screens—that nod at humanity’s interconnectedness, and, ultimately, help the boy learn that his is only one among many rich lives.

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• 
  Entitlement

  by Rumaan Alam (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  The protagonist in Alam’s fourth novel is Brooke Orr, a thirtysomething Black woman living in New York. Brooke has just started working at a foundation that is dedicated to giving away the fortune accumulated by an office-supply magnate named Asher Jaffee. Brooke’s career path dismays her adoptive mother, an unmarried white woman, but Asher sees Brooke as just “the sort of woman he wanted working in his name” and decides to make her his protégée. Under Asher’s wing, Brooke tags along when he meets with the Ford Foundation, rides around in the cocoon of a chauffeured Bentley, and advises her boss to spend nearly a million dollars on a Helen Frankenthaler painting. One of Brooke’s friends finds her becoming transfigured, strangely beautiful and animated. Once, she was one of those people who thought that “money, like grace, would be accrued.” But her association with Asher has convinced her that she is now someone to whom money, like grace, will just happen. She develops the certainty of the manic, or the converted, and Alam deftly chronicles how proximity to great wealth ultimately unhinges her.

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  Read more: “Other People’s Money Can Drive You Mad,” by Laura Miller
• 
  Headshot

  by Rita Bullwinkel (Viking)

  Fiction

  A boxing tournament for teen-age girls in Reno serves as the backdrop of this novel, which proceeds round by round, entering the psyche of each competitor as she squares up against her opponent. The boxers include a well-groomed heir to an athletic legacy and a gangly outsider who leans into the chaos of the fight; if the girls are sure of their bodies, they are often uncertain of where they belong. Each bout is written in rapid-fire bursts, moving between past traumas and into the characters’ futures, long after they’ve left boxing behind. With prose that channels the sport’s intensity, Bullwinkel creates a group portrait that insists on centering her subjects’ idiosyncratic lives.

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• 
  Woodworm

  by Layla Martínez, translated from the Spanish by Sophie HughesAnnie McDermott (Two Lines)

  Fiction

  Vengeance and ghostly visitations undergird this début novel about a young woman and her grandmother who live in a house where they are plagued by what they call “the woodworm”: a “bastard itch that won’t leave you in peace or let you leave others in peace either.” The women’s story is anchored in a long-simmering feud with their wealthier neighbors, which reaches back generations; when a child goes missing, the town’s collective suspicions fall on the granddaughter, and the conflict boils over into the present. Shadowed by the Spanish Civil War and the remarkable cruelty of men, the violent tale unspools into a potent consideration of inherited trauma and the elusiveness of justice.

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• 
  Small Rain

  by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Greenwell’s latest novel unfolds within the consciousness of a patient hospitalized with a rare vascular condition. Tangled in tubes, with machines that beep and bring constant news of his body, the narrator participates in a parallel activity of self-monitoring, retrieval, and discovery. Pain, he observes, “had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence; I wasn’t impatient or bored, there was something fascinating and dreadful about the experience of my body. I began negotiating with it, with the pain or with my body.” What sustains the novel is what sustains the narrator: his partner L, at home worrying. From a tale of great pain—a rare kind of story—the book becomes one so difficult to render that it is thought to be impossible: a story of ordinary love and ordinary happiness.

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  Read more: “An Anatomist of Pleasure Gives Voice to the Body in Pain,” by Parul Sehgal
• 
  The Missing Thread

  by Daisy Dunn (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  This engaging book, by a classical historian, surveys three thousand years and argues that women were more integral to the development of the ancient world than prevailing narratives suggest. Dunn’s subjects include Pandora, whom Greek mythology identifies as the “first woman”; Locusta, the toxicologist who helped Agrippina to poison Claudius; Fulvia, a late Roman politician who raised an army after her daughter was scorned by a lover; and the scores of anonymous Etruscan women who maintained a thriving quasi-matriarchy until the Roman ascendancy. “Women are everywhere that antiquity raises its head,” Dunn writes. “They are the authors of our history.”

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• 
  Colored Television

  by Danzy Senna (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  Senna has spent her career finding humor in the ways that biracial people are questioned, fetishized, or ignored in America. Her latest follows a writer, Jane Gibson, whose main issue with her mixed identity is figuring out how to exploit it properly. Jane has spent nine years on a sprawling family saga that her husband, a Black visual artist, calls the “mulatto War and Peace.” When it’s rejected for publication, she fibs her way into television, pitching an influential showrunner on a biracial sitcom that she hopes might lift her family out of housing limbo. What follows is a tart, incisive portrait—both of the country and of the narcissistic task of self-commodification.

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  Read more: “Danzy Senna Is Amused by Your Mixed Feelings,” by Julian Lucas
• 
  Life as No One Knows It

  by Sara Imari Walker (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  In this treatise, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist posits a new account of life: Assembly Theory, which identifies the threshold between nonliving and living complex objects—anything from a rock to a coffee cup to a human being—by counting the “steps” it takes for the universe to assemble them from their smaller parts. (In the lab, Walker and her team found that, on Earth, objects with an assembly index below fifteen steps are nonliving.) Assembly Theory has already attracted much attention, but more compelling is its underpinning idea of a “new physics” that places information front and center. “The fundamental unit of life,” Walker argues, “is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time.”

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• 
  Impossible Creatures

  by Katherine Rundell (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Rundell’s tenth book for children, and her first foray into outright fantasy, revolves around a cluster of North Atlantic islands, magically hidden for thousands of years. There, supposedly mythical creatures, long since hunted to extinction in the rest of the world, still flourish—centaurs and sphinxes, dragons and krakens, mermaids and manticores. Now, though, those creatures are struggling. Their existence depends on the magic that suffuses the Archipelago, but that magic, known as the glimourie, is on the wane. It’s up to Rundell’s two intrepid child protagonists, a boy from North London and a girl from the Archipelago, to figure out what’s gone wrong. As this setup suggests, “Impossible Creatures” has something to do with environmental decline here in our own world. Yet it is not a parable. Its real subject is twofold: the dazzling beauty of the natural world, to which the very young, who are not yet accustomed to it, so often have special access; and the potential bravery of children, to which, in our helicopter-parent world, they so often do not.

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  Read more: “Where Dragons Are Real and the Unicorns Are in Serious Trouble,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Napalm in the Heart

  by Pol Guasch, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Written in lyrical, if brutal, fragments, this dystopian novel takes place in an unnamed country riven by military strife and environmental disaster. Its narrator, a young man who lives in the forest with his mother, sustains himself by writing letters to his city-dwelling boyfriend. But, following a violent confrontation with a soldier, the young man embarks on a harrowing drive across a post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering mercenaries and desperate refugees along the way. If Guasch’s formally inventive approach can sometimes risk murkiness, the beauty of his prose shores up his story, in which language, love, family, and home are in constant peril.

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• 
  Playground

  by Richard Powers (W. W. Norton & Company)

  Fiction

  The fourteenth novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Overstory” essentially comprises three story lines. The first is about an all-­conquering tech giant whose diagnosis of dementia has compelled him to revisit his happiest memories. A second story line concerns a close-knit, dwindling community on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia, that must decide how to respond to an offer from American investors who want to launch a libertarian seasteading enclave nearby. The third follows Evelyne Beaulieu, a famous oceanographer, as she reflects on her life’s work and all the destruction she has witnessed. A Silicon Valley-inspired twist brings these threads together. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that an A.I. entity appears—and that it does not end up destroying life as we know it. In fact, the representation of A.I. is almost sympathetic, suggesting the possibility that machines could learn grace and benevolence. In a scene involving two characters playing the Chinese strategy game Go, one of the book’s central themes emerges: The players are competitive, but it’s the game’s complexity, the numerous possibilities in every decision, that appeals to them most. What if the point of life isn’t to win but to keep surviving, together?

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  Read more: “Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Bright Objects

  by Ruby Todd (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this layered début novel, set in 1997, is a young funeral attendant named Sylvia, who lives in a small town in Australia and is planning her suicide. Sylvia sets the date for it on the second anniversary of her husband’s death in a hit-and-run, but, before the time comes, she falls in love with an American astronomer working at a nearby observatory, where he discovered a comet that some townspeople have since endowed with conspiratorial significance. As Sylvia attempts to track down the driver who killed her husband, the book develops the momentum of a thriller; meanwhile, the astronomer’s skepticism about drawing meaning from the stars enriches the text with the provocations of a philosophical novel.

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• 
  Reagan

  by Max Boot (Liveright)

  Nonfiction

  A movement conservative turned Never Trumper, Boot set out to explore where the G.O.P. went wrong by writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, and the result is a definitive one. Boot idolized Reagan while growing up, but his book is not a defense of Reagan as the Last Good Republican. It takes up Reagan’s hostility to civil rights and Medicare, and deems him complicit in the “hard-right turn” that “helped set the G.O.P.—and the country—on the path” to Donald Trump. And yet Boot sees a redeeming quality as well: Reagan could relax his ideology. He was an anti-tax crusader who oversaw large tax hikes, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, and a diehard anti-Communist who made peace with Moscow. He had relinquished “the dogmas of a lifetime,” Boot writes. This biography carries a pointed message for conservatives: Reagan achieved greatness, Boot argues, by abandoning his ideology.

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  Read more: “What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  My First Book

  by Honor Levy (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

  Levy is a twenty-six-year-old literary personality in the micro-scene known as Dimes Square. “My First Book,” which combines short, chaotic character studies with dispatches from her lower-Manhattan milieu and meditations on being an Internet native, wants to reproduce the ecstatic, youthful feeling of being swept up by one’s time and place, selected for a particular era in history. Levy’s strength is her style: energetic, funny, with a forlorn sweetness and innocence. It feels like the Web, not only because of its generous helping of contemporary slang (Levy includes a whole Zoomer glossary, with entries like “UwU,” “Nerf,” and “Ketamine”) but also because it pulls in material with no regard to context: the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe sit alongside Bella and Edward, from “Twilight.” There’s an element of social signalling to the references—Levy is obsessed with cataloguing trends and in-jokes—but she appears to be clowning on the world and herself in equal measure. In these stories, brands, campaign strategists, and pop stars are divorced from any sort of stable meaning and collapsed together in a whirl of gleeful stimulation.

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  Read more: “The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom,” by Katy Waldman

• 
  Playing with Reality

  by Kelly Clancy (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  Games may be a diversion, but, as Clancy, a neuroscientist, writes, they also can provide useful models of the real world. In this comprehensive study, which fuses science, world history, and politics, she documents the role that games have played in medicine, economic thought, moral philosophy, A.I., and more. Although knowledge acquired from gaming has had worthwhile practical applications, from text translation to advances in cancer treatment, games don’t necessarily reflect reality, and players don’t always act rationally. In detailed chapters on topics like modern war-game simulations and the misapplication of game theory in justifying mass privatization, Clancy warns of the societal risks of allowing mathematical models to govern political decisions.

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• 
  On the Edge

  by Nate Silver (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This book—like Silver’s previous one, “The Signal and the Noise”—is a hefty set of meditations on probabilistic thinking. But this time the author, America’s most famous elections prognosticator, is taking in broader horizons, extending the lessons of poker and modern gambling to arenas like artificial intelligence and ethics. He has spent time interviewing such notables as William MacAskill, the philosopher-evangelist of effective altruism; Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced cryptocurrency billionaire; and Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI. The people changing the world are doing it by thinking like poker players, Silver contends. If we want to keep up, we’ll have to learn the mind-set of the successful gambler.

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  Read more: “The Power of Thinking Like a Poker Player,” by Idrees Kahloon
• 
  The Secret Life of the Universe

  by Nathalie A. Cabrol (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  This compact and often astonishing overview of the current state of astrobiology, by a director at the SETI Institute, explores the scientific advances of the past few decades, many of which have radically altered our understanding of the universe and, Cabrol argues, brought us close to finding extraterrestrial life. Space telescopes—most notably the Kepler, launched in 2009—have revealed a cosmos “populated by more planets than stars,” and infrared surveys of those planets’ atmospheres will yield vast amounts of data in the coming years. Cabrol, an assured and accessible guide, notes that interpreting that data poses a great challenge: because we still lack a consensus on the definition of life, we may not know it when we see it.

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• 
  The Letters of Seamus Heaney

  Edited by Christoper Reid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This eight-hundred-page collection is an intimate portrait of Heaney’s everyday commitments. Many a letter begins with an apology for its belatedness; many others detail the innumerable obligations—the classes taught, the lectures delivered, the reviews drafted, the prizes judged, and, too rarely, the poems composed—that made prior correspondence impossible. Perhaps Heaney’s most complicated duty was to his country. He believed poetry to be a project of the self, but as Northern Ireland was ripped apart by the Troubles—and as Heaney became Ireland’s most prominent writer—he increasingly felt compelled to address the war around him.

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  Read more: “How Seamus Heaney Wrote His Way Through a War,” by Maggie Doherty
• 
  The Coin

  by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult)

  Fiction

  In this début novel, a wealthy, fashionable Palestinian middle-school teacher living in Brooklyn wrestles with feelings of alienation. Seeing dirt everywhere, she begins to wash herself compulsively. Her lessons become strange and her relationships with her students blurry. After a dalliance with a man, she gets swept up in a scheme involving reselling luxury handbags. In a moment of winking symbolism, she comes to believe that a coin she swallowed as a child is living in her body, altering her personality. Somewhat surreal, and willing to risk a little provocation, Zaher’s book plays with overlapping ideas of privilege, asking complex questions about what past suffering means in the face of a desire for today’s luxuries.

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• 
  Living on Earth

  by Peter Godfrey-Smith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Usually, histories of life introduce us to creatures in sequence, showing how Earth’s menagerie has changed with time. But Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science, has a different goal: he wants to show how different forms of life have altered the Earth, creating the conditions for the creatures that follow, beginning with cyanobacteria adding oxygen to the atmosphere and ending with climate change. Each kind of creature sees the world in its own way, Godfrey-Smith writes, and so “our shared world can easily seem to fade.” But “our actions are poured, together, into a common arena.” The idea is to give us a better sense of the space we occupy together, and of our ongoing responsibility for it.

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  Read more: “How Natural Are We?,” by Joshua Rothman

• 
  Fierce Desires

  by Rebecca L. Davis (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Davis, a professor of history and of women’s and gender studies at the University of Delaware, centers her chronicle on marginal identities, whether of nonconforming individuals or of whole peoples whose sexualities were vilified and constrained by conquest and exploitation. Her book is structured around a series of short biographical accounts—running from colonial-era sex police to the contemporary moral panic over Drag Queen Story Hour—and she fleshes out her case studies with a sympathetic imagination. For her, these are potent parables, revealing how questions of sex, gender, orientation, and identity have had the ability to disrupt communities from the nation’s beginning. They’re the overlooked antecedents to today’s battles over issues like gender nonconformity and reproductive rights.

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  Read more: “The Forgotten History of Sex in America,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

  by Noliwe Rooks (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This slim, engaging work of history looks back on the life of Mary McLeod Bethune, a Black educator and activist who was born to former slaves in the Jim Crow South and rose to prominence as an adviser to several U.S. Presidents. Though not a household name today, Bethune was well known and admired during her lifetime. She was a mentor to the poet Langston Hughes and persuaded business owners in Florida to invest in a “beach for Black people.” Rooks, whose grandmother graduated from Bethune-Cookman University, one of the many institutions Bethune founded, excavates Bethune’s biography to reveal valuable lessons for the present.

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• 
  Turning to Stone

  by Marcia Bjornerud (Flatiron)

  Nonfiction

  This compelling and lucid work is not just about the life of the planet but also about the life of the author. Bjornerud, a geologist, structures each of the book’s ten chapters around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. Bjornerud has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English. She is fond of calling us “earthlings,” to remind us that our most urgent identity is as creatures who evolved on and depend on this planet, and she argues that our lives are shaped in profound and ongoing ways by the ground under our feet.

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  Read more: “Studying Stones Can Rock Your World,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Why Animals Talk

  by Arik Kershenbaum (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  A wealth of information is contained in this account of animal cognition, which focusses on such vocal creatures as hyraxes, parrots, gibbons, and chimpanzees. Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, relates tales from his field work—including a frigid expedition to northern Italy, where the wolves he listened for all day approach in darkest night—which demystify the howls, clicks, and whistles that could otherwise pass for noise. There are myriad examples of animals communicating: dolphins, for instance, seem to name themselves. Though animal utterances are different from our own, comparing animal expression to that of humans can illuminate the complex reasons behind the evolution of communication in each species.

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• 
  The Rich People Have Gone Away

  by Regina Porter (Hogarth)

  Fiction

  The precipitating event in this novel of COVID and comeuppance takes place on a hike, when a married couple—who have fled Brooklyn for a cottage upstate—have an argument. The wife, who is pregnant, throws hot tea at her husband; then, as he remembers it, he “let his wife dangle, if only momentarily,” over a cliff. After the wife runs away, the husband files a missing-persons report, and he becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance. Porter’s story has the signposts of a mystery and the economically stratified ensemble cast of a social novel. In chapters centered on characters whose lives are disrupted by the couple’s drama and by lockdown, people sift through pasts whose cruelties match those of their pandemic present.

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• 
  Grown Women

  by Sarai Johnson (Harper)

  Fiction

  Four generations of Black women are at the heart of this tender and expansive novel, which begins in the nineteen-seventies. When Charlotte, eighteen years old and pregnant, flees her wealthy family’s home, she is determined to do better by her unborn child than her mother, Evelyn, did by her. But Charlotte’s choice leads to a life of poverty; eighteen years later, her daughter, Corinna, also gives birth to a girl. For Evelyn, Charlotte, and Corinna, the baby represents an opportunity “to move, if not on, then forward,” to break from patterns of physical and emotional violence carried out by the men in their lives, and by their own mothers. The three women endeavor to raise the girl together—a journey that leads them to discover the limits of forgiveness, and to reassess what it looks like to raise a “grown woman.”

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• 
  The Importance of Being Educable

  by Leslie Valiant (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  When we think about what makes our minds special, we tend to focus on intelligence. But if we want to grasp reality in all its complexity, Valiant writes, then “cleverness is not enough.” Valiant, an eminent computer scientist at Harvard, thinks the more important quality is “educability”—the ability to gather diverse kinds of knowledge, often in a slow, serendipitous way, and knit them together. This explains why the books we read in college might not be understood until decades later, or why a good doctor doesn’t rely solely on what she learned in medical school. Human beings—unlike A.I., for example—constantly improve their minds through an unfolding, open-ended process that connects newly acquired facts and ideas to ones collected long ago.

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  Read more: “What Does It Really Mean to Learn?,” by Joshua Rothman

• 
  Hitler’s People

  by Richard J. Evans (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Through a series of biographical essays on prominent Nazis—including Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, and Leni Riefenstahl—this book explores how members of the initially small but violently fanatical National Socialist movement came to dominate German politics and carry out unprecedented atrocities. Evans, a noted historian of modern Germany, complicates earlier portrayals of these figures as either bloodthirsty psychopaths or the inevitable product of historical forces. Instead, he foregrounds the ways that their individual psychologies and sociocultural backgrounds primed them to make self-interested and ideologically motivated decisions that ultimately resulted in the horrors of the Second World War.

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• 
  Sea Level

  by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

  We talk about “sea level” as if it’s an unmoving benchmark against which we can measure elevation. But the oceans, of course, are never at rest; they have risen and fallen by hundreds of feet alongside changes in the Earth’s glaciation, and they are currently pushing, at a fairly rapid clip, over seawalls and into cities. How did we come to treat the sea as a synonym for stability? The environmental historian Wilko Graf von Hardenberg writes that sea level is best thought of as a social and historical construct, the result of decisions by generations of people doing their best to make sense of a strange and chaotic world. Elevation was once expressed as the amount of time it would take a person to climb to a destination, or as the distance from whatever baseline was locally known and useful. But, by the turn of the twentieth century, European scholars were gathering regularly to define sea level for the Continent, even as their ongoing studies of the Earth slowly undermined the theory of a stable sea. Von Hardenberg’s history is a story not of the way sea level has changed over time but, rather, of the ways in which humans have made use of sea level as a marker of where we stand in the world.

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  Read more: “Our Very Strange Search for ‘Sea Level,’ ” by Brooke Jarvis
• 
  The Bookshop

  by Evan Friss (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  “The Bookshop” is a series of thirteen mini-profiles of notable bookstores and their owners, from Benjamin Franklin and his printing shop in the early eighteenth century to places like Three Lives, in New York’s West Village, today. Friss sees the small bookstore in contemporary America as a haven from commercialism—a place where books are treated as more than mere merchandise—and as a community-building space. Such retailers welcome everyone—toddlers, oddballs, and professors. Competing with the e-commerce leviathans, they schedule author appearances and other events; regulars drop in to chat about books. The rewards are not just material. In Friss’s account, the bookstore survives by redefining itself.

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  Read more: “Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space?,” by Louis Menand
• 
  The Salt of the Universe

  by Amy Leach (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This volume of comic essays recounts Leach’s upbringing in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and her eventual withdrawal from “the regulated march of fundamentalism.” With an off-kilter tone and a dexterous, irreverent attitude toward religious fervor, Leach explores a range of topics, including vegetarianism, contemporary Christian music, and teaching English classes in Paraguay. Many of the chapters are attuned to the beauty of the natural world. “In the forest one is exempt from instruction and dogma,” Leach writes, “though not from sermons, for the birds preach: Sing. The grapevines preach: Climb a tree. The lichens preach: Patience.”

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• 
  Someone Like Us

  by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf)

  Fiction

  A pensive anomie pervades this potent novel about Ethiopian immigrants in the United States. The narrator, a journalist who lives in Paris, arrives at his mother’s house, in Virginia, to learn that his biological father, a taxi-driver, has died by apparent suicide. The journalist proceeds to investigate the mystery surrounding the man, who was “full of secrets” and less a father to him than “something like an uncle.” In doing so, the narrator, a drug user in flight from a failing marriage, also investigates his own troubled childhood. The result is an exemplification of storytelling as a consolation for the yearning and dislocation of immigrant life. As the father says, “We are always in more than one place at a time.”

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• 
  Hum

  by Helen Phillips (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)

  Fiction

  “Hum,” a meditative fable about marriage and motherhood, draws on sci-fi and suspense tropes to impart a gentle shimmer of uncanniness to its domestic realism. The book takes place in a dystopian world that is at once recognizable and subtly different from our own. Surveillance cameras and screens are as omnipresent as the pollution in the air; privacy, access to nature, and freedom from advertising have become luxury goods. Hums—graceful, tireless, superintelligent robots programmed for gentleness and empathy—occupy a growing number of positions in the workforce, especially in the service sector. Glowing, human-size eggs, called wooms, whose walls stream content, are designed to make users feel “safe and loved.” The book’s chief interest is not the Armageddon of climate change hovering in the wings but the dehumanizing, anhedonic grind of daily life, a constant battle against the temptations of consumption and technologically mediated distraction. People rely on technology to compensate for ecological ruin; they bathe in the beauty of screens because they’ve made the physical world ugly. As Phillips’s characters outsource their humanity to their devices, the machines that they’ve built seem to absorb their best selves.

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  Read more: “Is A.I. Making Mothers Obsolete?,” by Katy Waldman
• 
  The Safekeep

  by Yael van der Wouden (Avid Reader)

  Fiction

  This impressive début novel, which is long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, is set in 1961 in the Dutch countryside, where the traumas of the Second World War have festered and conservative social attitudes prevail. Isabel, the story’s misanthropic protagonist, still lives in her childhood home, long after her siblings have moved to the city. When her elder brother’s vivacious, mysterious girlfriend turns up at the house for a monthlong stay, Isabel is suspicious and treats her with contempt. Yet her disdain soon transforms into desire, leading the two women into a clandestine relationship. Ultimately, the pair’s sensual love story is tested by revelations that force Isabel to reckon with the Netherlands’ role in abetting the Holocaust, and her family’s in silencing its survivors.

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• 
  All That Glitters

  by Orlando Whitfield (Profile Books)

  Nonfiction

  Whitfield’s memoir of his fifteen-year friendship with the disgraced art dealer Inigo Philbrick gives a momentous relationship its due, with unusual directness. It is an art-world story and a scammer story—in November, 2021, Philbrick pleaded guilty to defrauding clients of more than eighty-six million dollars—but it is also a close and careful examination of a life-altering relationship. Throughout the book, as Whitfield strives to convey the absurdity and frivolity of the international art market, and the boundless opportunities for criminality its atmosphere creates, he works just as hard to try and explain why Philbrick’s friendship was so consequential, why it “shaped the way I experience and confront the world.” One of the most endearing aspects of Whitfield’s narrative is the precision and enthusiasm with which he pinpoints all the traits that drew him to Philbrick and kept drawing him in, even as flickers of his friend’s predatory unscrupulousness began to emerge. “This book isn’t journalism,” Whitfield writes, “for there can be no objectivity where love has lived.”

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  Read more: “A Frank Account of an Unequal Art-World Friendship,” by Rosa Lyster

• 
  Charlie Hustle

  by Keith O’Brien (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  Pete Rose, a product of Cincinnati’s hardscrabble west side, was a man of average physical gifts who propelled himself to unparalleled athletic heights and a mythic status hard to imagine for a baseball player today. His on-field excellence was ultimately undercut by his many faults of character and bouts of criminality and rule-flouting, which included betting on baseball while serving as the manager of the Reds, for which, in 1989, he was suspended from Major League Baseball, for life. Rose’s singularly rich and checkered life has been the subject of dozens of profiles and exposés, but O’Brien’s narrative gains impressive authority from the depth of its research: O’Brien spoke to Rose for twenty-seven hours across many months. He also spoke with scores of Rose’s former teammates, former players, an ex-wife, and an ex-mistress, along with two former M.L.B. commissioners, the men who placed Rose’s bets, and the men whose investigation brought him down. The resulting book is the more thorough account of one of the most fascinating rags-to-riches-to-infamy sagas of twentieth-century celebrityhood at a time when baseball was central to America’s story writ large.

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  Read more: “Pete Rose and the Complicated Legacy of Cincinnati Baseball,” by Brandon Harris

• 
  The Long Run

  by Stacey D’Erasmo (Graywolf)

  Nonfiction

  What’s the secret to being an artist? And how, once you’ve made art, do you sustain your practice? These are the questions that D’Erasmo found herself asking a few years ago, after publishing three novels and confronting a series of personal and professional crises. The result is this anthology of interviews, in which she talks to eight artists, including the dancer Velda Satterfield, the writer Samuel R. Delany, the actress Blair Brown, the musician Steve Earle, and the abstract painter Amy Sillman. The creative life is often shrouded in mystery, but D’Erasmo uncovers the workaday traits that it relies on, whether it’s the ability to adapt to changing circumstances or the inner steel that keeps artists true to their craft.

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  Read more: “Are You an Artist?,” by Alexandra Schwartz
• 
  Fifteen Cents on the Dollar

  by Louise StoryEbony Reed (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  The title of this deeply researched book points to the authors’ sobering calculation that, for every dollar of wealth that a typical white family has, a typical Black family has about fifteen cents. The writers attribute this stark gap to, among other culprits, the 2008 financial crisis, predatory lending practices, discrimination, and risk-based pricing models used by the insurance industry. Focussing on Atlanta, Story and Reed relate the lives of several residents, including a former president of the Georgia N.A.A.C.P. and the son of a man shot by a police officer, to elucidate both the Black-white wealth gap and the “Black-Black wealth gap”—the divide between wealthy Black Atlantans and their poorer counterparts.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Circle of Hope

  by Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Griswold traces the tumult of the pandemic and the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement in one Philadelphia church, as four young pastors battle over what it means to devote one’s life to others. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Devil’s Contract

  by Ed Simon (Melville)

  Nonfiction

  Simon’s lively account explores the distinct historical phases of the tale of Faust and his deal with the Devil. In the early modern period, a cowed culture flirted with the danger of freedom and blasphemous knowledge, while the Faustian myth mainly enforced the proper religious and social punishment. In time, an anxious theological orthodoxy was supplanted by a broader fascination with the frontiers of knowledge itself. These days, Simon argues, in an excoriating and eloquent final chapter, we write our contracts not in blood but in silicon, signing away our identities and privacies for the short-term benefits of material ease. Simon, who is especially alive to the transgressive, enjoys the energetic heresies of the Faust myth, its madcap adventures, and, since he has read extremely widely, he relishes sharing all of that narrative wealth with his lucky readers.

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  Read more: “Deals with the Devil Aren’t What They Used to Be,” by James Wood
• 
  Swift River

  by Essie Chambers (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  Diamond, the teen-age narrator of this powerful début novel set in the nineteen-eighties, is the only Black person in her New England mill town, where she lives with her mother. Diamond wrestles with the memory of her father, with ordinary teen angst, and—after she receives a letter from a long-lost aunt—with a rupture in the town’s past: the expulsion, seven decades earlier, of the community’s Black residents. Throughout, Chambers’s sharply observed characters butt up against one another in funny and poignant ways. Diamond’s unexpected friendship with another girl propels the story in surprising directions, but it is Diamond’s fraught relationship with her mother that forms the heart of this ultimately hopeful coming-of-age story.

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• 
  Godwin

  by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  Mark Wolfe, the protagonist of this intricately structured novel, is a technical writer in Pittsburgh going through an emotionally turbulent spell. Amid upheaval in his workplace, Wolfe is lured by his English half brother—an aspiring soccer agent who is “a tornado of unreliability”—into a quest to locate a prodigiously talented young African player named Godwin before a rival does. Their effort leads them from England to France to Benin, and, ultimately, back to the U.S. Ruminative, digressive, and epigrammatic, O’Neill’s novel is both a hilarious picaresque and a series of meditations on family, ambition, colonialism, and the history of soccer. “Football is not predictable,” one character observes. “Life is not predictable.” Neither is this novel.

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• 
  Keeping the Faith

  by Brenda Wineapple (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  In 1925, religion was loosening its hold on American life. New technology was transforming society, Darwin’s theory of evolution was gaining credence, and Protestant Christianity was in retreat, with a select group of preachers and citizens—the self-styled fundamentalists—trying to return the nation to God. Wineapple studies the spectacle that followed: the Scopes trial, wherein a Tennessee teacher was charged with the crime of teaching evolution. Clarence Darrow led the defense, and the prosecution included William Jennings Bryan, the thrice-failed Presidential candidate who believed that Christianity guided people toward the common good. Wineapple deftly shows how each side met the other with prejudice and disdain—a dynamic familiar today, when the chasm between a militant religious right and the progressive left can seem unbridgeable.

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  Read more: “How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again,” by Michael Luo
• 
  Fire Exit

  by Morgan Talty (Tin House)

  Fiction

  This striking début novel of cultural inheritance and painful family bonds follows a man living across the river from Maine’s Penobscot reservation, where he was raised by his white mother and Native stepfather, and where he lived until he was effectively evicted by a law that tied residency to official tribal status. The man spends his days observing his estranged daughter, who was the result of an unexpected pregnancy, and whose mother, a Penobscot woman, brought her to the reservation. Taking care of his own aging mother, he unearths details he hadn’t known about his past, which he aches to share with his daughter, believing that they belong to her, too.

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• 
  Thom Gunn

  by Michael Nott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Diaries, letters, and interviews are assembled in this profoundly intimate biography, which traces the life of a revelatory gay poet. Nott follows Gunn from his childhood in London to places such as Cambridge, San Antonio, and San Francisco, as he struggles with addiction and loses loved ones to AIDS. In himself, Gunn sees “a desire for a consistent and unbrutal strength” and “various complicated different kinds of cowardice,” but also “a readiness to enjoy my experience.” Most poignant is Nott’s treatment of Gunn’s loves, both shallow and deep, and the men who inspired much of his verse: “Nothing is, or will ever be, / Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart, / But what we hold in trust / We do hold, even apart.”

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• 
  Private Revolutions

  by Yuan Yang (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Four Chinese millennials are the protagonists of this journalistic chronicle, which attempts to portray the ways in which China’s economic and social transformations of the past thirty years manifest on a personal scale. Yuan’s subjects, all women, include the founder of a successful education business in Beijing, an urban transplant whose mother was killed in an accident while working in a coal mine far from home, and two labor organizers: one who pursued that path after working in factories, another after obtaining a sociology degree. Yuan, a former Beijing correspondent for the Financial Times who is now a British Labour M.P., captures each woman’s life as she contends with obstacles—from stolen wages to discouraging parents—and embraces new freedoms.

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• 
  Double Exposure

  by Robert Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Beginning in 1867, the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan explored the American West as part of government-sponsored geological surveys. He was already known for his images of Civil War battlefields, which defined the conflict for many Americans, and the photographs he took during his later travels attest to the nation’s transformations following the war. Retracing O’Sullivan’s itinerary more than a century later for this study, Sullivan deftly takes up such themes as the political power of both photography and geology, the United States’ tortured racial hierarchies, the exploitation of natural resources—including land, gold, and silver—and the dispossession of Indigenous communities.

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• 
  Loving Sylvia Plath

  by Emily Van Duyne (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This impassioned reassessment of Sylvia Plath’s life and work blends feminist theory and biography to challenge various narratives that have dominated criticism of the poet since her suicide, in 1963. One focus is Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, whom Plath accused of violence; for decades following her death, Van Duyne argues, Hughes shaped Plath’s legacy in an effort to obscure this history. Many of Hughes’s misdeeds (burning Plath’s journals, altering the manuscript of “Ariel”) are well-trod territory, but Van Duyne’s approach, in which she shows how certain publishers, critics, and biographers helped maintain some version of Hughes’s account, feels fresh and vital.

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• 
  The Garden Against Time

  by Olivia Laing (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Not long before COVID hit Britain, Laing and her husband toured what would become their home together, in Suffolk, a few hours’ drive northeast of London. The house, as she explains in the opening of “The Garden Against Time,” was previously owned by the late garden designer to the stars Mark Rumary, and her infatuation with its long-overgrown garden is immediate. When Laing moves in, the pandemic in full bloom, in August, she begins to bring the neglected garden back to life, and reads about examples from the past. Many of the book’s chapters center on historical figures for whom gardens symbolized both loss (of innocence, of aristocratic land holdings) and regrowth (of nature, of utopian projects). Laing intertwines their biographies with accounts of unfolding events in her pandemic life, phases of her garden-restoration project, and her past experiments in radical plant-based living as an environmental activist and an herbalist. She retreats to her garden not to escape the forward march of time but “to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness.”

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  Read more: “The Paradoxical Paradise of the Garden,” by Katie Kadue
• 
  The Winner

  by Teddy Wayne (Harper)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this page-turning novel of ruthless ambition is Conor O’Toole, a debt-laden striver newly graduated from law school, who lands a summer job giving tennis lessons in a wealthy gated community in Massachusetts. Fit and handsome, with “a certain Kennedy-esque air,” Conor soon attracts the attention of a rich divorcée twice his age, who lives in the largest house in the compound and offers to pay him double his hourly rate for services on and off the court. Conor’s situation becomes more complicated still when he falls in love with a young aspiring novelist with a trust fund. The longer Conor lives among the privileged élite, the more he yearns for “the money and the real estate and the bone-deep confidence” of his new neighbors. Risky and violent decisions ensue.

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• 
  Triumph of the Yuppies

  by Tom McGrath (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

  McGrath’s book is an entertaining recap of the time when a certain type of young urban professional ruled the country. Yuppies strode forth from the economic wreckage of the nineteen-seventies ready to consume conspicuously, to buy things they didn’t need—and pay extra for the brand. It wasn’t just O.K. to be rich; it was good to be rich. It justified the American way of life. McGrath frames his account with the story of Jerry Rubin as the model of a nineteen-sixties person who became a nineteen-eighties person. Rubin was famous as a co-founder of the Youth International Party, the Yippies, in 1967, and as a leading participant in several iconic Vietnam War-era protests. Then, in 1980, he published an Op-Ed in the Times announcing that he had taken a job on Wall Street as a securities analyst. He had realized, he said, that “money is power.” But this era wasn’t all just a matter of branded water, trendy restaurants, Rolexes, and Rolodexes, as McGrath shows. Behind the queasy fascination with yuppies lay a fracturing middle class and a growing gap between the affluent and everyone else.

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  Read more: “When Yuppies Ruled,” by Louis Menand
• 
  From Our Pages

  Glory Days

  by Simon Rich (Little, Brown)

  Fiction

  In a collection of stories featuring such characters as Super Mario, tooth fairies, Death Skull, and a participation trophy, Rich takes a comic look at, as he puts it, “millennials struggling to make the leap from childhood to old age”—and all that is lost and learned in the process. Several of the stories, including “We’re Not So Different, You and I,” first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  The God of the Woods

  by Liz Moore (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  Told from rapidly shifting points of view across several decades, this expertly paced thriller tracks the disappearance of a young woman named Barbara Van Laar from a summer camp in the Adirondacks, which is owned by her fabulously wealthy family. The Van Laars and their associates are a shady bunch, and the novel plays dexterously with the tension between the opulent family and the working-class environs in which they live. Barbara’s vanishing is further darkened by rumors that a recently escaped serial killer, who “does not believe in any god except himself,” is stalking the forest. Driven by a sprawling plot, Moore’s novel explores adolescence and social class and has the kineticism of a well-crafted miniseries.

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• 
  The Bluestockings

  by Susannah Gibson (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  The well-bred English women of the mid-eighteenth century who made up the group known as the Bluestockings held salons and promoted high-toned intellectual conversation. They also wrote, prolifically, and in genres that were largely considered the province of men: criticism, classical scholarship, and history. At a time when women were seldom taken to be rational creatures, they braved scorn and resentment, wielding their social respectability as a weapon. And yet, as Gibson, an Irish historian, shows in her intelligent and engrossing book, that weapon was sometimes used against their own. The Bluestockings could be quite punitive toward any among them who strayed from the straight and narrow.

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  Read more: “The Original Bluestockings Were Fiercer Than You Imagined,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  Gretel and the Great War

  by Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  At the start of this inventive novel, which is set shortly after the First World War, an unknown woman, unable to speak, appears on the streets of Vienna. After she is institutionalized, a letter arrives from a man claiming to be her father. A mysterious one-way correspondence begins, ultimately coalescing into twenty-six linked tales of aristocrats, artists, eccentrics, and revolutionaries. Though tending toward the whimsical, the stories also display the dark undercurrents of early psychiatry. Along the way, tantalizing clues about the woman’s identity, and that of her mother, are glimpsed. Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place.

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• 
  They Called It Peace

  by Lauren Benton (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  This history demonstrates how European imperial expansion in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia from 1400 to 1900 was fuelled by so-called small wars. Taking place during times of ostensible peace, these conflicts—involving raids, massacres, and enslavement—weakened indigenous resistance and produced truces that secured terms under which colonial powers enacted further, now lawful, violence. Benton, a historian at Yale, uses harrowing case studies from around the world, and contextualizes events with the work of contemporary intellectuals, such as Jeremy Bentham, who “upheld the necessity of colonial violence for the protection of property . . . standing in for the common good.”

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• 
  The Friday Afternoon Club

  by Griffin Dunne (Penguin)

  Nonfiction

  This consuming family memoir recounts comically foul judgment, striking privilege, and unspeakable tragedy. Dunne grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of the movie producer (and, after failing at that, crime reporter) Dominick Dunne, whose brother and enduring rival, the writer John Gregory Dunne, would marry Joan Didion. Those figures loom over Dunne’s book, as does his sister, Dominique, who was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 1982, when she and Dunne were cultivating their acting careers. Throughout Dunne’s account, which concludes in 1990, with the birth of his daughter, he drops frequent bombshells, details raging family battles, and admits to frequent (if winsome) acts of self-sabotage.

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• 
  Long Island Compromise

  by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House)

  Fiction

  When Carl Fletcher, the heir to a Styrofoam fortune, is abducted outside his Long Island estate, in 1980, his wife, Ruth, withdraws two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the bank as easily as if she’s getting a coffee to go. She delivers a briefcase with the money to a baggage carrousel at J.F.K. Airport, and, within minutes, Carl is dropped outside a Mobil bathroom, drenched in piss, vomit, and relief. The novel, Brodesser-Akner’s second, traces the aftereffects of the kidnapping on Carl and Ruth’s three children, who grow up to squander the fortune their self-made grandfather painstakingly accumulated. Brodesser-Akner names this state of affairs the Long Island Compromise: people born poor will struggle but be resourceful, whereas those born rich will turn into basket cases but never have to wonder how they’ll pay the therapist.

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  Read more: “Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Scabrous Satire of the Super-Rich,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  The Silence of the Choir

  by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Europa)

  Fiction

  In this ambitious, Goncourt Prize-winning novel, seventy-two African asylum seekers arrive in a fictional town in rural Sicily after a harrowing journey, only to find themselves at the center of an ideological battle that splinters the community. Sarr moves adroitly between the viewpoints of a wide cast of characters—refugees, politicians, advocacy workers, xenophobic vigilantes, a priest, an eminent poet—while probing the complexities of Europe’s debate over asylum. Ultimately, the novel suggests that it is not only members of the far right, “obsessed with their phobia,” who deserve excoriation but also those more sympathetic to migrants’ plights who nonetheless “reduce a refugee to a walking tragedy.”

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• 
  In Tongues

  by Thomas Grattan (MCD x FSG)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this moody novel is a young man attempting to make a fresh start in New York City at the outset of the twenty-first century, seeking—through dead-end jobs, anonymous sexual encounters, and a gradual infiltration of the art-world élite—a new way to be seen. Amid his adventures, he wonders whether self-scrutiny is anything more than self-obsession, and if answering questions like that one is really a path to maturity. Grattan casts early adulthood as a period of inertia, in which a person is trapped between the urge to be present and the desire to move on—a time of life whose outward expressions are, above all, absurd.

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• 
  Change

  by Édouard Louis, translated by John Lambert (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  In “Change,” Louis unravels a story he told a decade earlier, in his best-selling autobiographical novel “The End of Eddy” (2014). “Eddy,” which became an international sensation and a local scandal, dramatized the violence of Louis’s upbringing in the village of Hallencourt, in northern France, and the routine humiliations he endured growing up gay. “Change” enumerates the costs and consequences of the act of narration, with an avid, unsparing eye for distortion and error. “At just over twenty I’d changed my first and last names in court, transformed my face, redesigned my hairline, undergone several operations, reinvented the way I moved, walked and talked, and got rid of the northern accent of my childhood,” Louis writes. But his new life seems to give him little creatively; it dulls him. So he stalks his past—waiting, it seems, for the transformation, that intensity of sensation, to happen again.

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  Read more: “The Seditious Writers Who Unravel Their Own Stories,” by Parul Sehgal
• 
  Woman of Interest

  by Tracy O’Neill (HarperOne)

  Nonfiction

  At thirty-three, O’Neill, a writer and a professor who grew up in the Northeast, embarked on a quest to locate the South Korean woman who gave birth to her. In this dark, deeply funny memoir, O’Neill relates the story of that quest. Although her tale contains familiar elements (DNA searches, a trip to the motherland), she handles them uniquely. Framing her narrative as a detective story, she writes in a comedic voice that’s at once old-fashioned and contemporary—Dashiell Hammett meets “Fleabag.” Discursive detours give the book an intentionally shaggy feel: “Unruly story forms imply how a writer believes the shape of life goes,” she notes. It’s a keen observation, elegantly illustrated by the life of the woman at the center of her investigation.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Other Rivers

  by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Twenty-four years ago, Hessler, a staff writer and MacArthur grant recipient, published “River Town,” a celebrated memoir of the years he spent teaching English in a remote city in China. It was a time of rapid transformation, when millions of people were moving from poor, rural communities to seek education and economic opportunity in urban areas. Now, in “Other Rivers,” he recounts his experience of returning to the country, in 2019, to teach at Sichuan University. In intimate, finely drawn portraits of his students, he captures the ambitions and fears animating a new generation of young people as they navigate the political and cultural landscape of the education system in China and abroad. Parts of the book were drawn from articles originally published in the magazine.

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• 
  Consent

  by Jill Ciment (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  “Consent” is an account of Ciment’s marriage to the painter Arnold Mesches, told largely through a rereading of the author’s 1996 memoir, “Half a Life.” Ciment was sixteen years old when they met; Mesches was forty-seven. The two were married for almost half a century, until Mesches died in 2016. In “Half a Life,” Ciment portrayed herself as a “sexual aggressor” determined to seduce Mesches—was it a false narrative of empowerment? And what of their ensuing years together? “Was my marriage—the half century of intimacy, the shifting power, the artistic collaborations, the sex, the shared meals, the friends, the travels, the illnesses, the money worries, the houses, the dogs—fruit from the poisonous tree?” she asks in “Consent.” She does not think she was wounded; her marriage was long, happy—but what could she be concealing from herself?

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  Read more: “The Seditious Writers Who Unravel Their Own Stories,” by Parul Sehgal

• 
  Night Flyer

  by Tiya Miles (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Harriet Tubman’s early years in Tidewater Maryland were filled with physical torture and emotional terror. Forced to work as a maid, a nanny, a trapper, and a field hand, she was whipped constantly and regularly deprived of food and clothing. What was never beaten out of her was a sense of liberty—the knowledge, self-evident to her, that God intended for her to be liberated from bondage. “God set the North Star in the heavens,” she said later. “He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free.” In “Night Flyer,” Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, resurrects Tubman’s spiritual life, considering her alongside not only intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass but also Black evangelists of the era. The little we know about Tubman’s motivations comes robed in Scripture and prayer—blinding garments for modern eyes, but Miles helps us see.

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  Read more: “The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman,” by Casey Cep
• 
  From Our Pages

  Cue the Sun!

  by Emily Nussbaum (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  Nussbaum, a staff writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner, turns her acute critical eye on the history of reality television, which became popular by offering “something authentic, buried inside something fake.” From “Candid Camera” to “The Gong Show” to “The Real Housewives,” Nussbaum writes, such programs have “functioned as a mirror of the people who watched them—and if that reflection was sometimes cruel, it was also funny, riveting, outrageous, and affecting, even if—maybe especially if—you found it disturbing.” This book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  The Work of Art

  by Adam Moss (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This collection of interviews, by a former editor of New York, aims to illuminate artists’ processes through conversation. The novelist Michael Cunningham describes writing first thing in the morning to avoid getting “lost in the realness of the real world”; the visual artist Kara Walker recounts beginning one project by drawing with her feet (“I can’t trust this hand not to make something very obvious”). Moss’s footnotes flag common themes, including tenacious work ethics, mentorship, and iterative revisions. His subjects’ accounts are enriched by color images of works in progress: the outline of a concerto (Nico Muhly), a line of poetry scribbled in a faculty meeting (Louise Glück).

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• 
  The Struggle for Taiwan

  by Sulmaan Wasif Khan (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  As Khan observes in his rich and thoughtful book, the fraught status of Taiwan is bedecked with bad history, which muddles our understanding of what is at stake in East Asia. Start with China’s claim that Taiwan was always part of China, a cornerstone of Xi Jinping’s nationalism. In fact, for most of its history, Taiwan was no more a part of the Chinese nation than, say, Gibraltar was a part of Britain. Khan shows how politicians in Washington have often felt that they had both to defend democratic Taiwan and to reassure Beijing that Taiwanese independence would continue to be resisted. Avoiding violent conflict, he suggests, will take a great deal of diplomatic finesse guided by a profound knowledge of local history and politics.

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  Read more: “How to Start a War Over Taiwan,” by Ian Buruma
• 
  The Coast Road

  by Alan Murrin (HarperVia)

  Fiction

  Set in a small town in northwestern Ireland in 1994, this finely wrought début novel depicts the limited options that were available to unhappily married women in that country prior to the referendum that legalized divorce there, the following year. It centers on the friendship between a poet who has returned to town as a pariah after a scandalous affair in Dublin and the discontented wife of a local politician. Murrin powerfully renders the ways that women’s freedom, individuality, and self-expression are stifled by religion, custom, and gossip, and, as one character reflects, how “bitterness could poison a life, could make you lousy with exhaustion.”

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• 
  Combee

  by Edda L. Fields-Black (Oxford University Press)

  Nonfiction

  Harriet Tubman’s greatest feat may also be among her least known—a raid of Confederate rice plantations on the Combahee River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, which liberated more than seven hundred enslaved Americans. She did not lead the raid, as some recent histories suggest, but she was integral to its success: for more than a year, Tubman gathered intelligence from formerly enslaved men and women fleeing the Confederacy, and she recruited troops, scouts, and pilots from around Port Royal, South Carolina, to help the Union Army fight its way through enemy territory. Fields-Black’s new history, “Combee,” powerfully situates Tubman among her contemporaries—not only the controversial military geniuses who advanced the war effort through espionage, river raids, and guerrilla tactics but fellow freedom seekers who, like Tubman, chose to go back down to pharaoh’s land and fight.

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  Read more: “The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman,” by Casey Cep
• 
  From Our Pages

  Frostbite

  by Nicola Twilley (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Twilley, a frequent New Yorker contributor, studies an invention that transformed vast swaths of human life, from our nutrition to our cities to the layout of our homes. Her focus is the so-called cold chain—nearly three-quarters of everything Americans consume is shipped, packaged, and stored under refrigeration. And Twilley gives us a tour of the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, Missouri’s cheese caves, and the enormous vats that hold the nation’s orange-juice reserves. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  On Call

  by Anthony Fauci M.D. (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Although most readers will turn first to the chapters about the U.S. response to COVID and Fauci’s dealings with the Trump Administration, this autobiography by the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases covers his entire life, from boyhood and medical training to retirement, and thus presents an implicit demand for us to see his career whole. The two greatest public-health crises of his career—COVID and AIDS—also form something of a diptych, the resonances between them impossible to ignore. Both involve asymptomatic infection, a scramble for tests and treatments, public-information campaigns, and the search for a vaccine. And in each Fauci is vilified—first by militant AIDS activists, later by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, populist Republicans and libertarians, and a panoply of conspiracy theorists. But the differences are as revealing as the similarities, in ways that, by the end of the book, test even Fauci’s resistance to pessimism.

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  Read more: “Anthony Fauci’s Side of the Story,” by Jerome Groopman
• 
  Long Island

  by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

  Fiction

  Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant in New York whom Tóibín introduced in his novel “Brooklyn,” returns in this deeply felt but resolutely unsentimental sequel. The book, which takes place in the nineteen-seventies, two decades after the events of the earlier installment, opens with Eilis—now a mother of two living on Long Island—learning that her Italian American husband has impregnated another woman. The news sparks Eilis’s return to her home town, Enniscorthy, where she has not been for some twenty years, and where she reconnects with a man with whom she had a dalliance early on in her marriage. Tóibín uses masterly restraint to dramatize how lives can be destabilized by desire.

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• 
  Ask Me Again

  by Clare Sestanovich (Knopf)

  Fiction

  This début novel, by a noted writer of short stories, begins as Eva, the self-conscious teen-age daughter of middle-class parents, befriends a boy named Jamie, an intellectual with a contrarian streak who comes from a wealthy family. In the next few years, Eva graduates from a prestigious college and gets a job at a newspaper while contending with romances, ambitions, a nascent political consciousness, and a changing relationship with her parents. Meanwhile, Jamie drops out to join a thinly veiled Occupy Wall Street. Throughout, the novel considers how a life’s trajectory takes shape, and how much it is influenced by other people: “Eva herself thought about impressions all the time. She liked picturing it literally: the mark that you left on someone or that someone left on you.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Parade

  by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Cusk’s latest book is not so much a novel as a study of the isolation caused by the impulse to create art. The artists here—male, female, white, Black, all named “G”—follow their inspirations and their insecurities in ways that distance and alienate the people around them. Also a look at gender roles in art and in life, “Parade” considers the ways in which being female is a social performance, one often at odds with the untethered impropriety that making art requires. The opening chapter, “The Stuntman,” first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Cosmic Connections

  by Charles Taylor (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

  We once lived in an “enchanted” universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, the Canadian philosopher writes, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the world that Enlightenment liberalism produced: one of fragmented belief and atomized selves. But Taylor thinks that the Romantics can tell us how this splintered realm can be mended. In his view, the arts can help us reënchant the world, restoring those resonant feelings of wholeness and of harmony—not just with “Nature” but with existence itself.

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  Read more: “How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Orwell’s Ghosts

  by Laura Beers (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In the nearly seventy-five years since George Orwell’s death, his writing has been appropriated for various ideological ends. In this lucid, engaging study, Beers teases out its intricacies, considering, for instance, Orwell’s dual commitment to socialist revolution and “traditional” English society; his apparent dismissal of feminism; his belief in individual liberty; and why he ultimately valued truth above freedom of speech. The complexity (and sheer volume) of Orwell’s work means that he has frequently been misunderstood. Beers reaches a satisfying synthesis, writing that Orwell illuminates how “to resist the temptations of totalitarianism in favor of a more open and democratic socialism.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones

  by Priyanka Mattoo (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  The author describes a magical childhood in Kashmir, which her family was forced to leave, and the many countries, cultures, and kitchens through which she has travelled since in the quest for home. Sections about the musician Ali Sethi and her mother’s Rogan Josh recipe originally appeared on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Attachments

  by Lucas Mann (University of Iowa)

  Nonfiction

  The inner tumult of the contemporary dad, full of unprecedented new highs, lows, and targets for neurotic speculation, is the subject of this memoir. It is an intense, poetic, and almost uncomfortably honest book about what he describes as the “mundane enormous terror of watching a child grow.” Mann, who has previously published books about minor-league baseball, reality TV, and the effects of addiction on his own family, writes with a mix of bliss and dread, all of it suffused with a relentless sense of self-scrutiny. Like many in their mid-thirties or forties, cis-het men with progressive viewpoints and vaguely middle-class leanings, he aspires for an approach to fatherhood in rough agreement with his politics. And, throughout “Attachments,” he returns to the various forces that prepared him for this moment—the signals from society, the novels or art works that once gave him pause, the examples of friends and family—until he realizes that none of it properly readied him for the work at hand.

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  Read more: “Should We Expect More from Dads?,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Caledonian Road

  by Andrew O’Hagan (Norton)

  Fiction

  O’Hagan is a journalist and editor-at-large at the London Review of Books, where he has written some of the publication’s best-known investigative, as well as comic, pieces. He is the toast of London society, a well-dressed and knowing presence at parties and polo matches. In his sprawling new novel, “Caledonian Road,” he skewers the scene’s hypocrisies. Campbell Flynn, the novel’s doomed protagonist, is an art historian who seems to have everything going for him. He’s married to a brilliant psychotherapist, and has two high-achieving grown children and impeccable liberal credentials. He’s written a successful book on Vermeer (“A work of mesmerising empathy”) and hosts a BBC podcast called “Civilisation and Its Malcontents.” He is also, we learn, beset by money problems and dangerously close to a breakdown. The novel follows the unravelling of his tidy life over the course of a year, as he writes an ill-conceived self-help book and becomes entangled with a promising student who upends his world view. O’Hagan calls him a “tinderbox in a Savile Row suit.”

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  Read more: “Andrew O’Hagan’s Bonfire of the Vanities,” by Anna Russell

• 
  The C.I.A.

  by Hugh Wilford (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  This adroit new overview by Wilford, a historian, examines how, after the Second World War, the United States set out to direct politics on a global scale. Many of the C.I.A.’s actions, in Wilford’s telling, can be understood as desperate and often destructive attempts to control processes that lay well beyond the agency’s grasp. Much of this work took place in former colonies. The stereotype of the Cold War milieu—upturned collars, fog-bathed checkpoints—is misleading on this score. The real action was in warmer climes, Wilford shows. It was the end of colonial empires that made the Global South central. Each newly independent state, from Washington’s vantage, represented a chance to gain (or lose) influence. Of course, countries that had just thrown off empires bristled at outside attempts to guide them. Ironically, Wilford points out, this anti-imperialism empowered the C.I.A. The stronger the norm against meddling, the more U.S. leaders felt a need to hide their work. The C.I.A. thus became a new covert force of empire in an age of decolonization, Wilford argues.

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  Read more: “When the C.I.A. Messes Up,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Hey, Zoey

  by Sarah Crossan (Little, Brown)

  Fiction

  What, in our digital age, constitutes an affair? Texting? Swiping? How about buying an eight-thousand-dollar A.I. sex doll and hiding it from your wife in the garage? In this entertaining novel, the middle-aged narrator, Dolores, discovers that her husband has done just that. As Dolores’s marriage falls apart, she forms a strange bond with the doll, Zoey, who proves a better listener than her aloof husband (an aptly professioned anesthesiologist). Told in short scenes that crosscut the present with childhood memories, the story is as much about technology as it is about friendship and romance. Even if Zoey’s “aliveness” is “a ruse,” like that of an E. T. A. Hoffmann character, she offers Dolores both life-affirming companionship and a way to access her repressed soul.

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• 
  The Achilles Trap

  by Steve Coll (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  It has been tempting to view the C.I.A. as omniscient. Yet Coll’s chastening new book about the events leading up to the Iraq War, in 2003, shows just how often the agency was flying blind. Washington’s failure to foresee Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, was just one of what Coll calls a “cascade of errors” that would start several wars and end many lives. Saddam saw spies around every corner. This was reasonable, given the C.I.A.’s history, but Coll indicates that it was exactly the wrong fear. U.S. intelligence had missed Saddam’s Kuwait-invasion preparations, his nuclear program, and his subsequent disarmament. His real problem was not what the C.I.A. knew but what it didn’t.

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  Read more: “When the C.I.A. Messes Up,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Cull of the Wild

  by Hugh Warwick (Bloomsbury Wildlife)

  Nonfiction

  If people, either intentionally or accidentally, have altered the natural world to favor one species over another, do people then have an obligation to undo the damage? Warwick, a British ecologist and writer, considers a dozen recent campaigns to assist one species by “removing” its competitor. These include efforts to cull mice in favor of albatrosses, rats in favor of puffins, and pythons in favor of bobcats. Invasive species, Warwick points out, are among the main drivers of extinction today, up there with habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change. The author’s own attachment to animals runs deep; he stopped eating meat thirty-five years ago and generally avoids animal products. His particular passion is hedgehogs. One might imagine Warwick to be opposed to “killing in the name of conservation.” In fact, though, he’s conflicted. Conservation “is really complicated,” he writes. “There is an old saying that anyone who gives you a simple answer to a complicated problem is either a liar or a fool.” As Warwick observes, it’s way too late to debate whether humans have a right to intervene in the natural world, because “we have, as a species, already intervened.”

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  Read more: “Should We Kill Some Wild Creatures to Protect Others?,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
• 
  Committed

  by Suzanne Scanlon (Vintage)

  Nonfiction

  “My writing was fuelled by desperation, and madness, too,” Scanlon, a novelist, writes in this affecting memoir, which recounts her stay at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in her early twenties, following a suicide attempt. Dogged by a “preternatural sense of doom” after her mother’s death from cancer, she is solaced by the work of women writers, including Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath, who wrote their way through despair, and Audre Lorde, whose “Cancer Journals” feel like a “revelation.” If the hospital ward where Scanlon stayed felt at times like a “foreign country,” books served as a ballast for her fragile psyche.

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• 
  Sidetracks

  by Bei Dao, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang (New Directions)

  Poetry

  More than a decade in the making, this book-length poem traces its acclaimed author’s years in exile after his expulsion from mainland China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. Dotted with dates and locations of personal and historical significance—as well as encounters with friends and peers, such as Allen Ginsberg and Mahmoud Darwish—the poem combines the documentary and the elusive, finding meaning in language both when it “talks with the tanks” and when it captures the “sunshine tablecloth” in a California kitchen. Elegantly rendered into English, the poem exemplifies Bei Dao’s surprising imagery and logic while also introducing an autobiographical immediacy to his work.

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• 
  The Light Eaters

  by Zoë Schlanger (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  The contemporary world of botany is divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But research in recent decades has prompted the question that animates Schlanger’s book: Are plants intelligent? Schlanger writes about scientists who are studying how plants change their shape and respond to sound, how they use electricity to convey information, how they send one another chemical signals. Along the way, she becomes a sort of anthropologist of botanists. The book’s focus on the researchers themselves overcomes a challenge inherent to science writing: where to find drama. “The Light Eaters” is a special piece of science writing for the way it solves the genre’s bind; it doesn’t force people or their findings into narrative engines. Instead, the field of botany itself functions like a character, one undergoing a potentially radical change, with all the excitement, discomfort, and uncertainty that transformation brings. The book’s power comes from showing a field in flux and reminding us that ideas have their own life cycles: from crackpot theory to utter embarrassment to real possibility to the stuff of textbooks.

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  Read more: “A New Book About Plant Intelligence Highlights the Messiness of Scientific Change,” by Rachel Riederer
• 
  From Our Pages

  Beautiful Days

  by Zach Williams (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  In this eerie début story collection, Williams explores how easily the unknown can enter our everyday lives and change us. His work, which often teeters on the border between reality and the uncanny, asks more questions than it answers. Two stories from the collection, including “Wood Sorrel House,” first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  The Playbook

  by James Shapiro (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This perceptive history, by a Shakespeare scholar, centers on the Federal Theatre, a short-lived New Deal-era relief program that staged more than a thousand plays and employed more than twelve thousand artists before it was disbanded for allegedly disseminating “Communist propaganda.” Under the stewardship of Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar professor, the theatre produced plays that combined social commentary with documentary realism; its critically acclaimed shows included a voodoo-inflected “Macbeth” set in nineteenth-century Haiti. The theatre ultimately lost its funding after it was targeted by Martin Dies, the director of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose tactics, Shapiro wryly notes, are still employed by culture warriors seeking to defund or censor the arts.

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• 
  Catland

  by Kathryn Hughes (Hopkins)

  Nonfiction

  Louis Wain, an artist born in England in 1860, is the figure at the center of “Catland,” an entertaining and often surprising cultural history. Hughes examines a seventy-year period, stretching from the latter half of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth, during which, she writes, “cats transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors, with names, personalities and even biographies of their own.” In alternating chapters, Hughes narrates the life of Wain—whose drawings at the height of his popularity were as familiar as those of Beatrix Potter, and who spent his later years in a mental asylum, afflicted with symptoms of what may have been schizophrenia—and provides a zesty account of the many ways in which the cat came in from the alley and took up its place at the hearth. Hughes makes the case that the new world of cats which Wain both chronicled and helped to create is a signal instance of modernism in all its confusion and uncertainty. She writes, “When it came to ‘making it new’—that battle cry of early twentieth-century intellectuals—nothing conveyed the principle better than the transformation of the domestic cat from smudgy outlier to cultural obsession.”

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  Read more: “The Man Who Reinvented the Cat,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  I Cannot Control Everything Forever

  by Emily C. Bloom (St. Martin’s)

  Nonfiction

  This remarkable memoir, which takes its title from a work by Louise Bourgeois, describes the author’s fraught journey to parenthood and considers pregnancy through the lenses of science and art. Bloom, a literary scholar, interweaves the narrative of becoming the mother of a diabetic and congenitally deaf daughter with analyses of art works and brief medical histories. The sound of the voice-flattening vocoder in Laurie Anderson’s song “O Superman,” for instance, recalls cochlear-implant simulations. “I care for her and I care for her devices,” Bloom says of her child. “I am part mother, part machine.”

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• 
  Matrescence

  by Lucy Jones (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  In 2015, when the journalist and science writer Lucy Jones became pregnant with her first child, she found the experience joyful but discombobulating: after a difficult birth, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. She came to feel a sense that she “had been fundamentally misinformed about the female body and the maternal experience.” Her subsequent attempt to rebuild her conception of motherhood forms the basis of this wide-ranging and hugely ambitious book. Marshalling memoir, science, sociology, and history, Jones argues that, outside of adolescence, there is no transformation as dramatic in a human’s life, in both its emotional and biological impacts. Research has found, for instance, that motherhood causes big changes in the brain’s default-mode network, an area related to what Jones calls “the perception of the self.” She relates discoveries like these alongside moving reflections on her transformed state: “I had thought that my disrupted sense of self, my notion that I’d become a new hybrid creature, must be in some way fanciful,” she notes. In fact, “it was the idea that I was ultimately an independent individual that was fanciful.”

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  Read more: “ ‘Matrescence,’ and the Transformations of Motherhood,” by Anna Russell
• 
  The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

  Edited by Frank AbeFloyd Cheung (Penguin Classics)

  Nonfiction

  This essential volume collects more than fifty accounts of Japanese life before, during, and after the war. The title alone is a bold assertion of identity: for decades, the wartime incarceration of the Japanese was described in euphemistic terms such as “relocation” or “internment.” Abe and Cheung’s definition of “literature” is admirably broad, encompassing letters, editorials, poetry, short stories, manga, and government documents. Although there have been many books written on the history of incarceration, few have captured the kind of emotional detail that comes through in the largely first-person accounts collected by Abe and Cheung. Their selections paint a complicated picture, convening hopeful, patriotic idealists, righteous firebrands, and downtrodden cynics.

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  Read more: “A Portrait of Japanese America, in the Shadow of the Camps,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Vagabonds

  by Oskar Jensen (The Experiment)

  Nonfiction

  Impoverished nineteenth-century Londoners tend to come to us in the form of caricature or literature; this engaging history seeks to allow them to speak for themselves. Jensen delves into contemporary memoirs, trial proceedings, periodicals, and other sources to capture an “astonishingly eloquent collective.” He pays particular attention to differences not only of class but of race, country of origin, and gender (girls and young women in the streets, he notes, had to navigate “a London that is made of a thousand eyes”). As one fellow who has fallen on hard times puts it, “Hungry in a land of plenty, I began seriously for the first time in my life to enquire WHY, WHY—a dangerous question . . . isn’t it, for a poor man to ask?”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Other Olympians

  by Michael Waters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Late in 1935, a Czech track star, the winner of a bronze and a gold medal at the previous year’s Women’s World Games, revealed that he was planning to undergo surgery so that he could live openly as a man. The news made headlines around the world, and the track star, Zdeněk Koubek, was, for a while, internationally famous. He appeared on Broadway in a cabaret show; he shared top billing with Josephine Baker at the Folies-Bergère music hall, in Paris. Meanwhile, with the Berlin Olympics approaching, a Nazi sports doctor named Wilhelm Knoll used Koubek’s case as a rationale for instituting sex testing at the Games. Waters traces this history thoughtfully, and meticulously, revealing how much about this recent and relevant past we have forgotten, or never knew. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  The Invention of the Darling

  by Li-Young Lee (Norton)

  Poetry

  “True love looks out / through death’s unswerving gaze,” proclaims the poem that opens this collection, from a writer renowned for his renderings of erotic and spiritual ecstasy, and for work that braids together dream, myth, and memory in unabashed pursuit of the sublime. For Lee, devotion is both shadowed and illuminated by a consciousness of mortality. He employs an acute surrealist sensibility connected to the experience and anticipation of exile—from one’s mother country or tongue, from childhood, from a state of unity with the beloved, and, ultimately, from life. “I wasn’t born in this country, / but I’ll likely be buried here. / Nothing mysterious about that,” he writes. “Mysterious are the myriad gates / by which light comes and goes.”

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• 
  A Body Made of Glass

  by Caroline Crampton (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  The author of this thought-provoking exploration of hypochondria—which counts Marcel Proust and Charles Darwin among its sufferers—describes it as a difficulty in identifying “that boundary between fictional and real illness.” Delving into the medical literature, Crampton discovers that the conception of hypochondria has shifted greatly during the millennia, from its earliest diagnoses as a liver-and-abdomen complaint to its current unofficial status as a psychological problem (“hypochondriasis” is no longer included in the DSM). What emerges is a portrait of a condition that, though nearly as old as recorded human history, continues to elude neat definition, even as it raises urgent questions about “who is believed when they speak of their pain, and who is not.”

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• 
  Growth

  by Daniel Susskind (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

  “Modern economic growth began just two hundred years ago,” Susskind, an economist at King’s College London, writes. “If the sum of human history were an hour long, then this reversal in fortune took place in the last couple of seconds.” The turning point came with the Industrial Revolution, which triggered an explosion in prosperity in Europe and North America, and led to the sustained worldwide growth that humans are still enjoying today. In the past fifty years, the global economy has become twenty-six times bigger—or twelve times higher per person. In 1970, half of humanity lived in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than two dollars a day. Today, only a tenth of the global population lives in extreme poverty. But we’re also guzzling resources and belching carbon at unprecedented rates. The paradox of growth—that we suffer from both too much of it and too little of it—drives Susskind’s book. His narration properly captures the astonishing triumph of these shifts, even as he considers their dangers.

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  Read more: “The World Keeps Getting Richer. Some People Are Worried,” by Idrees Kahloon
• 
  Little Seed

  by Wei Tchou (Deep Vellum/A Strange Object)

  Nonfiction

  A family story and a natural history of the fern run in parallel through this memoir, in which chapters alternate between botanical esoterica and descriptions of Tchou’s personal life: she grew up in Appalachian Tennessee as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and she has a brother who, as an adult, is beset by psychotic episodes. The two narratives initially stay on their separate paths, but eventually Tchou finds graceful moments of glancing association, especially on the vexing topic of identity. “My family is rigid about identification with one another and with the whole,” she explains. “We lack the flexibility of taxonomists, to allow things to break apart and come back together.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two

  by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)

  Fiction

  Ferris’s début graphic novel, “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters,” was a breakout hit, garnering praise for its intricately cross-hatched drawings and its marriage of gothic-pulp aesthetics and sharp social commentary. The story is presented as the diary of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old girl growing up in the politically volatile Chicago of the nineteen-sixties. Ferris weaves together history, comic books, and horror to echo Karen’s sense of herself as a monster. In the second volume, Karen continues to dig deeper into her own evolving sensibilities about the inhuman and the obscene. The graphic novel was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  They Came for the Schools

  by Mike Hixenbaugh (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  Roughly five years ago, a racist incident prompted a Texas school district to investigate discrimination in its schools and, ultimately, to formulate a plan that included cultural-sensitivity training and the hiring of more teachers of color. The district presented its proposals not long after the murder of George Floyd sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, and it was met with fierce, well-funded resistance. A political-action committee was formed to oppose the plan; the following year, candidates endorsed by the committee swept elections for school board, city council, and mayor. As Hixenbaugh demonstrates, conservative activists across the country saw what happened in Texas as a blueprint—not only to get their preferred candidates elected but to launch an ongoing attack on public education itself.

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  Read more: “The Texas School District That Provided the Blueprint for an Attack on Public Education,” by Jessica Winter
• 
  The Ministry of Time

  by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader)

  Fiction

  In this compelling début novel, set in the near future, the British government has created a time machine and used it to retrieve a handful of people from other periods of history, referred to as “expats.” The book’s narrator is a minder for one of them: a nineteenth-century Royal Navy commander and polar explorer. Complications ensue when the narrator, who is Cambodian English, begins to fall in love with her charge, while also closing in on the truth of the mysterious extraction program. Throughout, Bradley meditates on mortality, grief, and imperialism. “Everything that has ever been could have been prevented and none of it was,” she writes. “The only thing you can mend is the future.”

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• 
  Faraway the Southern Sky

  by Joseph Andras, translated from the French by Simon Leser (Verso)

  Fiction

  This brief but layered novel follows a nameless figure wandering around Paris searching for traces of Ho Chi Minh, who lived there as a young revolutionary, near the end of the First World War. Ho is glimpsed through police files, plaques, and publications on his unlikely path to political power, working as a cook and a photo enlarger while managing his ceaseless political agitation. During the search, scenes of contemporary Parisian life are overlaid with memories of past struggle. In Andras’s depiction, the city’s history emerges as a deep record of past disruptions—and, perhaps, the stuff of present inspiration (the gilets jaunes make an appearance), if an observer is able to draw connections between the eras.

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• 
  Liberalism as a Way of Life

  by Alexandre Lefebvre (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, writes about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of the professional pundits. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous. Lefebvre recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to our anxiety. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.”

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  Read more: “Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Natural Magic

  by Renée Bergland (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Although Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson are not known to have ever crossed paths, this study finds meaning in their shared enchantment with the natural world. In the eighteen-thirties, as “natural philosophy” began to be reframed as “natural science,” emotion and wonder were eclipsed by objectivity and mastery. Darwin and Dickinson resisted this binary: Darwin saw his theory of natural selection as an occasion for humility, relating humans to other species; Dickinson, whose poetry reflects her extensive scientific education and interest in Darwin’s ideas, depicted the natural world with both botanical specificity and attention to its splendors. Bergland links their thinking to an earlier tradition of “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) magic, which emphasized the interconnectedness of life and valued emotion as a form of understanding.

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• 
  Traces of Enayat

  by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger (Transit)

  Nonfiction

  Literary obsession and detective work merge in this biography of Enayat al-Zayyat, an Egyptian writer who died by suicide in 1963, at the age of twenty-six, years before the publication of her only novel. Following the threads of al-Zayyat’s life, Mersal depicts the Egypt in which she grew up and the largely vanished Cairo where she lived, while chronicling her search for the forgotten author. “To trace someone,” Mersal writes, “is a dialogue that is perforce one-sided.” Indeed, despite assiduous research and interviews with surviving friends and family, Mersal experiences “despair at the possibility of knowing” the true story of al-Zayyat, whose remnants she embroiders with photographs, speculation, and personal reflections, leaving behind a seductive mystery.

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• 
  Tits Up

  by Sarah Thornton (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Thornton’s own breasts “made their debut on a summer’s day in the mid-1970s,” she writes. “Not yet a teenager, I imagined that my new assets might become a potent symbol of adult self-possession or a source of mesmerizing power.” That aspiration ended at fifteen, when the head chef at a local golf club groped her during her shift. Then, in her fifties, she underwent a double mastectomy after a series of biopsies revealed the presence of early-stage cancer. She soon found that she “had an overwhelming desire to understand the multifarious meanings and uses of breasts.” Here, Thornton is less interested in how breasts appear than in how they can be put to work—by sex workers, activists, milk donors, midwives and lactation specialists, surgeons, lingerie models, and swimwear designers. The broad truth that most American women “are dissatisfied with, indifferent to, or ambivalent about their breasts” is the premise of her book, one that wants to set these organs free with the goal of gaining a greater understanding of and appreciation for the people to whom they are attached.

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  Read more: “We Must Defend the Bust,” by Lauren Michele Jackson
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Art of Dying

  by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams)

  Nonfiction

  This posthumous collection gathers the final pieces written by The New Yorker’s longtime art critic, who died in October, 2022. The forty-six essays, all of which originally appeared in the magazine, include Schjeldahl’s unparalleled exploration of his life as a critic, which he wrote in the weeks after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. The volume demonstrates how Schjeldahl’s kinetic, wry, and inimitable style remained powerfully intact until his last days.

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• 
  Whale Fall

  by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  Manod, the observant narrator of this début novel set on the cusp of the Second World War, lives on a sparsely populated Welsh island where, one night, a whale washes up on the beach and dies shortly thereafter. Soon, two researchers turn up to document the customs of the islanders. Manod agrees to assist them, translating phrases (such as “sheep farmer”) and cultural realities (the people cannot swim). In time, however, misunderstandings arise between researchers and subject, imbuing their relationship with both alienation and tenderness. Stubborn transgressions committed by the interlopers testify to the hazards of anthropology and the delusions of so-called progress.

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• 
  Free and Equal

  by Daniel Chandler (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics, is a passionate evangelist for the great American philosopher John Rawls, using Rawls as his fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Rawls’s magnum opus, “A Theory of Justice” (1971), was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme where everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (economic inequalities have to be justified by their effect on the least advantaged). The vision Chandler extracts from this is, on the whole, a sane one of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

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  Read more: “Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism,” by Adam Gopnik

• 
  All Fours

  by Miranda July (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  July’s second novel is a study of crisis—the crisis being how middle age changes sex, marriage, and ambition. The unnamed narrator is a forty-five-year-old in L.A. with a mellow music-producer husband and a precocious seven-year-old. Less than an hour into a solo road trip to New York, she stops at a gas station, where a young man cleans her windshield. Soon the pair has succumbed to a magnetic, earth-shattering attraction, and the narrator has checked into a nearby motel, where she renovates her room in the style of an opulent Parisian hotel. The room becomes a love nest, of a kind, but a terrible deadline looms. The narrator’s putative road trip must end. What will happen when she goes home to face her life? July’s moving, very funny book is at once buoyant about the possibilities of starting over and clear-eyed about its costs.

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  Read more: “Miranda July Turns the Lights On,” by Alexandra Schwartz
• 
  Women and the Piano

  by Susan Tomes (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  In this engaging survey of fifty female pianists, from the eighteenth century to the present, Tomes aims to correct a male-centric understanding of piano history. Women pianists have long been scrutinized—for playing in a “masculine” style, for their appearances, for not orienting themselves around family. Through short biographies, Tomes documents the cost of pursuing art. Fanny Mendelssohn allowed her compositions to be published under her brother Felix’s name; Zhu Xiao-Mei continued studying Bach even after being sent to do manual labor during China’s Cultural Revolution. Yet the resounding note is one of passion. As Marguerite Long told her students, “My joy in life is work, because it will never betray you.”

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• 
  Dogland

  by Tommy Tomlinson (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

  The dog show is a forum optimized to display the weirdness of the current human-canine relationship: our lavish expenditure on dogs, our equally outsized emotional investment in them, and the degree to which we have quite literally shaped them as a species. Tomlinson, a journalist and former mutt owner, found himself captivated by the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show when he caught it on TV. The questions that came to mind, as Shih Tzus paraded around the ring, were not very scientific, but they were very American: Are these dogs happy? Are any dogs happy? Why do dogs make me so happy? Those musings form the kernel of his new book, which approaches its subject with a pleasing mixture of conviviality and comedic distance.

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  Read more: “The Wacky and Wonderful World of the Westminster Dog Show,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Revolusi

  by David Van Reybrouck (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This powerful account of the colonization of Indonesia takes the form of a people’s history, using interviews with those who lived under—and sometimes defied—Dutch rule. Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian best known for his work about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, shows how the Dutch relied on genocide and slavery to piece together the Indonesian “jigsaw puzzle.” As one colonist put it, “Trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.” Van Reybrouck also captures the hope that independence brought, showing how, before a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship ushered in a “crazed explosion of violence,” Indonesians’ fight against oppression inspired other nations to break free.

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• 
  Piglet

  by Lottie Hazell (Henry Holt)

  Fiction

  Newly installed in a house in Oxford, the protagonist of this novel savors visions of a future with her well-to-do fiancé. To her relief, they are a world away from her family in Derby, for whom she feels “a crawling embarrassment,” and from whom she received the nickname Piglet, for her prodigious appetite. Days before the wedding, however, her fiancé confesses a betrayal. Clinging to “the life she had so carefully built, so smugly shared,” Piglet insists on moving forward with the marriage. But amid sensuous descriptions of her cooking and of the vast amounts of food she begins to order at restaurants, battles between self-denial and indulgence, external expectations and inner feeling, start to consume her. Each burger and croquembouche is freighted with meaning.

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• 
  Lucky

  by Jane Smiley (Knopf)

  Fiction

  The main character of this warmhearted novel is Jodie Rattler, a girl who, at the age of six, accompanies her uncle to a racetrack and wins a roll of forty-three two-dollar bills. That talisman propels Rattler through life, from her upbringing in a gregarious family to a successful, if ultimately unfulfilling, career as a folk-rock singer-songwriter. As the novel wends its way from the nineteen-fifties to the near future, through multiple national crises—some historical, some speculative—Rattler contemplates the mixed blessings of her lifelong lucky streak and the contingencies inherent in “the great enigma . . . the sense you have, that comes and goes, of who you are, what a self is.”

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• 
  The Invention of Prehistory

  by Stefanos Geroulanos (Liveright)

  Nonfiction

  Stories about the deep human past rest on assumptions about what it means to be human in the first place, giving them normative implications for modern society. Geroulanos, a historian, notes that European intellectuals have, in the past two and a half centuries, turned to prehistory to explain things like the structure of families, the basis of states, the prevalence of war, and the contours of our nature. “Pre-history is about the present day,” he writes. “It always has been.” With careful attention to our collective accounting of our prehistoric roots, Geroulanous considers what is revealed about our present when we write about our past.

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  Read more: “What the Origins of Humanity Can and Can’t Tell Us,” by Maya Jasanoff
• 
  Shakespeare’s Sisters

  by Ramie Targoff (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  In this thoughtful study, Targoff, a literary scholar, highlights four female contemporaries of Shakespeare, women who “weren’t encouraged” and rarely received “even a shred of acclaim,” but managed to write nonetheless. Mary Sidney (the sister of the poet Sir Philip Sidney) produced a noteworthy translation of the Book of Psalms. Elizabeth Cary wrote “The Tragedy of Mariam,” the first original play published by a woman in England. Aemilia Lanyer was the first published English female poet of the seventeenth century, thanks to her “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” which mounted a “defense of women’s rights.” Anne Clifford, a voracious reader born to aristocrats, wrote a detailed journal; by “treating herself as a historical subject living an important life,” Targoff argues, she became the “most important female diarist” of her time.

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• 
  This Strange Eventful History

  by Claire Messud (Norton)

  Fiction

  Messud’s new book traces three generations of an itinerant French family with roots in North Africa. The Cassars are pieds noirs—people of European descent born in colonial Algeria—who flee their home during the Algerian revolution. Unwelcome in Paris, where they are seen as interlopers from the fringes, the Cassar children traverse the globe, seeking to assuage their lost sense of belonging through the myth of a perfect love. The novel brims with autobiographical details, many likely gleaned from a fifteen-hundred-page family history, titled “Everything That We Believed In,” that Messud’s paternal grandfather left behind. Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: “This Strange Eventful History” is a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it. The Cassars cling to an idealized memory of Algeria that’s untroubled by reality, the tree of knowledge unshaken, the apple still intact. Messud trusts her readers to bite down.

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  Read more: “Claire Messud’s New Novel Maps the Search for a Home That Never Was,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  Limitarianism

  by Ingrid Robeyns (Astra)

  Nonfiction

  This provocative consideration of extreme wealth accumulation asks how society might improve if the phenomenon were eliminated. Robeyns, a philosopher, uses the term “limitarianism” to describe an economic framework that would impose a cap on how much money any single individual can amass. Throughout the book, she outlines the concrete steps that her proposal would require, and reflects on its wider social implications, in the form of sweeping fiscal and ethical transformations. Ultimately, her account amounts to an argument for “why a world without extreme wealth concentration is better for us all.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  How to Baby

  by Liana Finck (The Dial Press)

  Nonfiction

  This hilarious, illustrated pregnancy and parenting how-to-ish book is for all the people who are tired of receiving useless advice on pregnancy and parenting but would like to vent about said advice. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Rough Trade

  by Katrina Carrasco (MCD x FSG)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this transgressive crime thriller, set in Tacoma, Washington, in the late nineteenth century, is Alma Rosales, an ex-detective who has constructed a new life as Jack Camp, a stevedore and an opium smuggler both beloved and feared by his crew. Alma commands this masculine world with “hard-worn knuckles and small-man’s swagger,” but when an old friend and love interest unexpectedly arrives, with a detective on her tail, their meeting sets off a series of dangers that almost cost Alma and her crew their livelihoods. At once richly atmospheric and finely paced, the novel is a potent and morally complex portrait of queer life and history.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Life Wants You Dead

  by Evan Waite (Chronicle Books)

  Fiction

  In a world that seems bleaker and more treacherous than ever, it’s important to remember all the ways in which you are imperilled, and to laugh at them, right up till the bitterly funny end. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Leaving

  by Roxana Robinson (Norton)

  Fiction

  This quietly compelling novel of forbidden love focusses on two characters in their sixties, Sarah (divorced) and Warren (married, not entirely happily), who dated as teen-agers and meet again by chance one evening at a performance of “Tosca.” Though its tone is muted, the book captures the aching pull of an all-consuming affair, which draws the characters away from their families and from the lives they have painstakingly built. Robinson examines the question of how difficult it is to abandon vows, even for people who came of age in the throes of the sexual revolution. Despite contemporary society’s general acceptance of divorce, the novel shows how desire can still have painful consequences.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

  by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  An eye-opening collaboration between two great American artists, this volume is not like any ABC book or gardening manual you’ve ever seen. A longtime New Yorker contributor, Kincaid unearths the secret history of the plant world, turning up the sometimes barbarous stories behind the garden blooms that we’ve been looking at all of our lives. Walker’s arresting watercolors bring it all to life. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

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• 
  Neighbors and Other Stories

  by Diane Oliver (Grove)

  Fiction

  In 1966, Oliver, an M.F.A. student at the University of Iowa, was killed in a motorcycle accident. This book, the first collection of her work, exhibits a unique delicacy in chronicling Black life in the nineteen-fifties and sixties—especially in the South amid the civil-rights movement. In the title story, a girl observes her brother on a tense night before he is to become the first to integrate his school; in another story, a young woman joins a lunch-counter sit-in. Oliver delves into subtleties of class, focussing on characters such as a doctor’s second wife and a daydreaming maid. At their best, the stories let ideas take shape gradually, making close observation the cornerstone of their politics.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  H Is for Hope

  by Elizabeth Kolbert (Ten Speed)

  Nonfiction

  “Climate change resists narrative,” Kolbert writes, “and yet some account of what’s happening is needed.” Here, she employs the alphabet as a framing device to walk readers through an array of colorful characters, notable events, bad actors, and big ideas, to make tangible the diffuse and troubling history of a changing climate—and our relationship to it. The piece first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Butter

  by Asako Yuzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Ecco)

  Fiction

  In this thriller inspired by true events, a journalist, Rika, becomes obsessed by the case of Manako Kajii, a sometime sex worker convicted of killing several men. Kajii reportedly seduced the men with her cooking—much to the confusion and chagrin of Japanese society, which tends to view Kajii’s “huge” body as an abomination. Rika interviews the wily Kajii in charged jailhouse meetings, and, as the two engage in an increasingly fraught game of cat and mouse, Rika’s relationships—with her boyfriend, her colleagues, and even her own body—begin to change. The novel cleverly intertwines paeans to the pleasures of eating with indictments of Japan’s standards for women: “Whichever aspect of it you considered, Rika thought, the Kajii case was tinged by misogyny and the excessive self-pity felt by lonely men.”

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• 
  All the Campus Lawyers

  by Louis H. GuardJoyce P. Jacobsen (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

  Commentators debate the extent to which a culture of “coddling” has taken hold of college campuses, and the degree to which offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion are responsible for it. Guard and Jacobsen outline how the systems at play are largely the creation of the federal government. Various federal statutes prohibiting discrimination protect programs and activities that receive federal funds, as most universities do. Prohibitions of discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin have been interpreted in recent decades to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2016, an expanded definition of “disability” was added to the Americans with Disabilities Act. For universities, these laws provide a potential cause of action at every turn. Students and employees who feel harassed, unsafe, or generally uncared for by virtue of their identities are entitled, under federal law, to make a complaint. The result is what Guard and Jacobsen call the “lawyerization of higher education,” a state of affairs where “the impact of the legal issues bearing down on institutions and their campuses has intensified to levels never before seen.”

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  Read more: “Academic Freedom Under Fire,” by Louis Menand
• 
  A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

  by Anthony Bale (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  The late-medieval traveller, it was said, always needed two bags: one full of money, one of patience. Such wisdom fills the pages of this immensely entertaining history, which is constructed around medieval guidebooks and travelogues, and highlights dazzling destinations like Constantinople and Rhodes under the Knights Hospitaller. Pilgrimage was a common reason people left home; by 1350, travellers could book a tour to Jerusalem that included transportation, meals, and currency exchange. Yet, as Bale shows, their experience of travel was not one we would entirely recognize. As one pilgrim put it, in 1384, “No one should travel who does not desire hardship, trouble, tribulation and the risk of death.”

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• 
  Knife

  by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  In August, 2022, more than thirty years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the killing of Salman Rushdie, an assassin came running at him. The man stabbed Rushdie as he was addressing an audience in Chautauqua, New York, and kept on doing so for nearly half a minute. Rushdie’s first thought was “So it’s you.” His second thought was “Why now?” Rushdie’s short masterpiece is a memoir about almost dying, the miracle of surviving, and being reconciled to a threat that could not be forgotten or outrun: “Living was my victory. But the meaning the knife had given my life was my defeat.” Ultimately, his account is an inspiration. “After the angel of death, the angel of life.”

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• 
  James

  by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  Since releasing his début work of fiction, in 1983, Everett has published roughly a novel every other year in addition to dozens of short stories, essays, and articles, plus a children’s book and a half-dozen poetry collections. His fictional protagonists have included ornery cowpokes and professors of esoterica. Much of his work is narrated in the first person, yet his “I” is often a fragmentary and destabilizing affair. In “James,” he retells the story of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved companion Jim. Conferring interiority upon perhaps the most famous fictional emblem of American slavery after Uncle Tom, the book seems to participate in the marketable trope of “writing back” from the margins. But there is no easy way to categorize what Everett is up to with this searching account of a man’s manifold liberation. The novel’s title is the name Jim chooses for himself.

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  Read more: “Percival Everett Can’t Say What His Novels Mean,” by Maya Binyam

• 
  From Our Pages

  All Things Are Too Small

  by Becca Rothfeld (Metropolitan)

  Nonfiction

  Rothfeld’s new collection of piquant essays eschews the contemporary predilection for minimalism in favor of indulgence, ambition, and surplus in all its forms. Rothfeld applies an incisive lens to everything from decluttering and fasting to mindfulness. One essay, on the œuvre of the film director David Cronenberg and body horror as a model for a new philosophy of consent, was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  What Kingdom

  by Fine Gråbøl, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Archipelago)

  Fiction

  In this striking début novel, Gråbøl documents daily life in a psychiatric ward for young people in Denmark. Waheed blasts 50 Cent and loves junk food; Marie lives a few floors above her mother; and the narrator, who remains nameless, recounts her struggle with bipolar disorder. Alternately lucid and ecstatic, the novel touches on the welfare system’s focus on bottom lines—“benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles”—and challenges the perception of mental illness as an invisible affliction, “inaccessible to any other.” Gråbøl’s portrait of the residents’ and caretakers’ interconnected lives constructs a communal existence out of individual pain.

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• 
  On Giving Up

  by Adam Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Like many of Phillips’s previous works, this roving collection of writings fuses the lexicon of psychotherapy with literary criticism to upend conventional ideas about common emotional experiences—among them repression, longing, and loss. Phillips enlivens these explorations with examples from literature and history: Kafka and Shakespeare appear, as does the Crow Nation, whose existence was radically altered by the decimation of the animals on which its people depended. Though occasionally meandering, Phillips’s agile treatment of familiar ideas often yields compelling analyses, as when he argues, in the titular essay, that our cultural prohibition on “giving up” compels us to “think of our lives in terms of losses and gains, or profit and loss.”

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• 
  Ian Fleming

  by Nicholas Shakespeare (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  The decolonization of the British Empire throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties brought particular attention to Ian Fleming’s famous debonair spy, James Bond. Shakespeare, a novelist and biographer, details Fleming’s own rise to stardom (his irritated wife called him the “oldest Beatle"), alert to the politics that infused his life and work. Fleming first tried journalism, then finance, faring poorly at both. In 1939 Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, John Henry Godfrey, tapped Fleming to be his assistant. The usual thing to say about Fleming’s intelligence work is that he was a deskbound underling who turned his daydreams into spy novels, but Shakespeare presents evidence of Fleming’s centrality. One officer felt that it was Fleming, not Godfrey, who effectively directed naval intelligence for most of the Second World War. Fleming emerged in his spy fiction as the voice of a beleaguered empire but could never quite deal with the way America was eclipsing Britain as a world power.

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  Read more: “What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Rabbit Heart

  by Kristine S. Ervin (Counterpoint)

  Nonfiction

  This memoir stretches across a quarter century to chart the investigation into the author’s mother’s murder, which occurred in 1986, after she was abducted from a mall parking lot in Oklahoma City. Ervin, who was eight at the time of the tragedy, follows the case with devastating rigor, shingling its developments with her memories of growing up without a mother. The adult Ervin, knowing that her mother was sexually brutalized, attempts to undo how that knowledge seems to have settled in her body—in the form of muscular dysfunction—but she also accepts the lasting nature of her grief: “Maybe I’ll always be the daughter, retracing her final footsteps to the car, seeing just how close I can get.”

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• 
  The Book of Love

  by Kelly Link (Random House)

  Fiction

  This novel, the first by an author celebrated for her short fiction, follows a group of teen-agers who are determined to live normal lives amid intrusions of magic. Three classmates wake up to find that they have died; confused and annoyed, they make a deal with two mysterious beings, who allow them to return home in exchange for their participation in a series of trials. A supernatural power struggle ensues, but the book devotes most of its attention to the ordinary world, slowing the action to examine the relationships between its characters, most of whom are queer. Here, a magical quest is less absorbing than the act of texting a crush.

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• 
  The Limits

  by Nell Freudenberger (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Set partly in New York City and partly in French Polynesia, this novel follows a family through the distress of 2020. Stephen, an overworked cardiologist, resides in New York with his new wife, who is pregnant. His ex-wife, Nathalie, a scientist, lives in Tahiti, where she studies deepwater-coral bleaching. Moving between these two worlds is their teen-age daughter, Pia, who has become attached to a Tahitian expert diver who works with her mother, and to his mission: to prevent mining companies from destroying the reefs, even if it might require violence. The novel’s evocation of contemporary troubles—Trump, COVID, ecological devastation—endows it with a sense of chaos that is at once limiting and liberating.

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• 
  Cocktails with George and Martha

  by Philip Gefter (Bloomsbury)

  Nonfiction

  When Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway, in 1962, it marked a watershed in American theatre, simultaneously enthralling and appalling audiences with its excruciatingly intimate portrait of a dysfunctional marriage. Tracing the life of the play from its first draft through the film version, adapted by Mike Nichols in 1966, Gefter deftly blends social history, textual analysis, and Hollywood gossip to probe the story’s appeal. At the heart of his inquiry are three real-life relationships—between Albee and his longtime boyfriend, William Flanagan; between Nichols and Ernest Lehman, the film’s producer; and between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the film’s stars—that illustrate the universality of Albee’s themes.

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• 
  Cahokia Jazz

  by Francis Spufford (Scribner)

  Fiction

  In this stylishly drawn mystery novel, the tropes of noir—among them a hardboiled detective with an artist’s soul, a powerful woman with a terrible secret, and a journalist chasing the story of a lifetime—appear in an alternative Jazz Age. Here, Native Americans did not succumb to smallpox, and the powerful and ancient Cahokia nation has joined the United States. This imagined America is studded with names borrowed from the real one: St. Louis might be a mere backwater, but T. S. Eliot is still among its locals. So, unfortunately, is the Klan, which is intent on wresting control of the city from its people and putting it under white, capitalist authority.

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• 
  The Wide Wide Sea

  by Hampton Sides (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  This new biography undertakes the hazardous enterprise of revisiting the life of Captain James Cook, who, at the time of his death in 1779 was Britain’s most celebrated explorer. In the course of three epic voyages—the last one, admittedly, unfinished—he mapped the east coast of Australia, circumnavigated New Zealand, made the first documented crossing of the Antarctic Circle, “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, and paid the first known visit to South Georgia Island. His admirers believed that he deserved the “gratitude of posterity.” Posterity, however, has a mind of its own. “Eurocentrism, patriarchy, entitlement, toxic masculinity,” are, Sides writes, just a few of the charged issues raised by Cook’s legacy. It’s precisely the risks, the author adds, that drew him to the subject.

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  Read more: “How Captain James Cook Got Away with Murder,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
• 
  The Tower

  by Flora Carr (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  Based on true events, this richly detailed novel takes place over the course of a year, in the late fifteen-sixties, on an island in Scotland. Mary, Queen of Scots, has been imprisoned by rebels and forced to leave her son, the future King James, with her enemies. She is pregnant with twins, having been raped by the man who became her third husband. After a miscarriage, she directs her remaining energy toward escape. Schemes ensue: could she jump from a tower window, seduce a visiting lord, or pose as a laundress? Her attending ladies, who are also imprisoned, are devoted to helping her reclaim the throne. Through her tale, Carr depicts the ways in which women can care for and exert power over one another.

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• 
  My Beloved Life

  by Amitava Kumar (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Jadu Kunwar, Kumar writes of his novel’s gentle hero, “had passed unnoticed through much of his life.” His experiences “would not fill a book: they had been so light and inconsequential, like a brief ripple on a lake’s surface.” Kunwar is born in 1935 in rural India. Eventually, he becomes a lecturer in history at a local college; gets married and has a daughter; and wins a scholarship to study at Berkeley, in the late nineteen-eighties, before returning to India. Kunwar’s life is told twice over in this book—the first large section recounts it in the third person, and then the second large section recounts it in the first-person voice of Kunwar’s daughter, Jugnu, bringing us to the present day. The realization that Kumar might be writing a fictionalized version of his own late father’s life breaks like a wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story. The novel’s astonishing details are pointedly revealed but not overpoweringly unpacked, having the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real. Above all, the tale is always deeply human, that of a son grappling with his father’s legacy by inhabiting his point of view.

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  Read more: “Amitava Kumar and the Novel of the Translated Man,” by James Wood