Book Review

The books in this month’s column have something in common: unforgettable main characters.

In a memoir and a novel, the characters deal with grief by singing in front of strangers.

In “Swimming Pretty,” Vicki Valosik connects the evolution of an unlikely sport with the century-long struggle of women to be taken seriously in the water.

In Fernanda Trías’s novel “Pink Slime,” one woman holds out in her town after an environmental disaster, trapped in a limbo of indecision.

Selected paperbacks from the Book Review, including titles by Darrin Bell, Maggie Smith, David Friend and more.

Bullwinkel’s debut novel sheds light on the culture of youth women’s boxing through an ensemble cast of complicated characters. It packs a punch.

Our columnist reviews June’s horror releases.

The watercolor cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore.

For Pride Month, we asked people ranging in age from 34 to 93 to share an indelible memory. Together, they offer a personal history of queer life as we know it today.

In “The Singularity Is Nearer,” the futurist Ray Kurzweil reckons with a world dominated by artificial intelligence (good) and his own mortality (bad).

Frederick Seidel’s 19th book, “So What,” is filled with politics, disease, luxury and provocation. At almost 90, he’s one of our best contemporary poets.

Rather than bemoan pop culture’s most divisive genre, Emily Nussbaum spends time with the creators, the stars and the victims of the decades-long effort to generate buzz.

He elevated many of France’s most provocative writers through his publishing house, La Fabrique, but he made his greatest mark as a politically engaged, and strolling, historian of Paris.

In his beautiful memoir, “Do Something,” Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.

Two decades after his death, a collection of over 800 works that the first president of Senegal owned is moving from France to Dakar.

In “A Gentleman and a Thief,” Dean Jobb vividly recounts the life and times of the notorious criminal — and tabloid fixture — Arthur Barry.

A massive, mysterious grizzly takes on symbolic weight in Julia Phillips’s moody and affecting second novel.

A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.

Richard Hatch gave up a career as a physicist to become a magician — and a one-man historical preservation society dedicated to a German author killed in the Holocaust.

Summer is here! Try this short quiz about books that happen to be set in popular vacation destinations.

“The New Breadline,” by Jean-Martin Bauer, a veteran food aid worker, chronicles a growing problem that should not exist — along with the harmful policies that have exacerbated it.

In “Frostbite,” Nicola Twilley travels the cold chain that preserves what we eat and helps it get around the world.

Tracy O’Neill’s memoir, “Woman of Interest,” recounts her yearlong quest, which culminates in a trip to Korea.

With her new book, “Children of Anguish and Anarchy,” Adeyemi is wrapping up her best-selling Legacy of Orïsha series. The journey hasn’t been easy.

Our columnist has summery new recommendations.

A dinner party at the other woman’s house; the evening before a jail sentence.

After getting her start by self-publishing, Freida McFadden is now the fastest selling thriller writer in the United States.

Starring an undergraduate student at Oxford, Rosalind Brown’s debut novel is exquisitely attuned to the thrill and boredom of academic life.

Santiago Jose Sanchez’ debut novel, “Hombrecito,” follows a young immigrant as he grows up in the United States, struggling to identify with a masculinity he’s never felt and a country he never knew.

In “The Friday Afternoon Club,” the actor and director recalls his years growing up around performers, writers and the Hollywood set.

After an $80 million expansion, the Folger Shakespeare Library is reopening with a more welcoming approach — and all 82 of its First Folios on view.

This week's selection includes titles by Gabrielle Zevin, Peace Adzo Medie, Patrick Mackie and more.

In her latest book, Olivia Laing makes an impassioned case for the garden — as repository of natural beauty, as democratic ideal, as writerly inspiration.

For young magazine readers with literary pretensions, it wasn’t just our best option; it was our only option.

“Contemporary Art Underground” showcases hundreds of artworks commissioned by the M.T.A., by artists like Alex Katz, Kiki Smith and Vik Muniz.

He turned “an insignificant trade house” into a powerhouse, publishing best sellers like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “All Creatures Great and Small.”

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

“The material that he uses for the songs is powerfully moving, involving his own personal losses,” the 88-year-old poet says. Also name-checked in “So What”: an Italian motorcycle magnate.

In “Adventures in Volcanoland,” the geologist Tamsin Mather takes us on a global and historical investigation of her life’s passion.

Across two new books, the ideal of a global free market buckles under pressure from protesters, politicians of all stripes and the Covid pandemic.

In her memoir, “Pets and the City,” Amy Attas reflects on three decades of caring for animals (and, by extension, humans) right in their own homes.

As a journalist and later as a Yale professor, she provided the intellectual tools to help actors, directors and audiences understand challenging theatrical work.

She received a diagnosis of Stage 4 breast cancer late in her second pregnancy and described her experience in a book, “Little Earthquakes: A Memoir.”

Andrew O’Hagan’s ambitious state-of-England novel finds a cosseted academic facing up to the hard lives and ethical shortcuts he’d prefer to ignore.

In Munir Hachemi’s novel “Living Things,” four young men seek adventure for “literary capital” and find exploitation.

Is the Mob Museum on your list? The writer and illustrator sees his new guide to North America’s museums as a way to help families plan their summer vacations.

In “The Indispensable Right,” Jonathan Turley argues that the First Amendment has been deeply compromised from the start.

In “The Language Puzzle,” the archaeologist Steven Mithen asks exactly how our species started speaking.

In her new novel, “Sandwich,” Catherine Newman explores the aches and joys of midlife via one family’s summer week at the beach.

In “A Place of Our Own,” June Thomas considers “six spaces that shaped queer women’s culture.”

“Same as It Ever Was,” by Claire Lombardo, is a 500-page, multigenerational examination of the ties that bind.

This quick quiz challenges you to identify a film’s source material based on a photo. Click here to play!

Our columnist on three twisty new tales of murder.

In her new book, Jessica Goudeau confronts a history of racism and violence in Texas through an investigation of her ancestors’ stories.

Joseph Earl Thomas’s new novel, “God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer,” follows a health care worker on a tumultuous shift where every other patient seems to be someone from his past.

The gritty, bloody and relentlessly youthful musical features some of the most effectively vivid violence seen on a Broadway stage.

A comprehensive new biography, by Michael Nott, lays bare the tragic circumstances behind a brilliant iconoclast’s life and work.

In Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, “Little Rot,” two exes trying to recover after a breakup inadvertently stumble into a dark, disturbing and dangerous side of Nigeria.

In her new book, “Traveling,” the music critic Ann Powers offers a highly personal, even confessional, meditation on Mitchell’s life, work and influence.

In “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself,” Glynnis MacNicol ignores the pearl-clutchers and does just that.

Notoriously reluctant to give advice, the author offered his views, and meticulous edits, to a lifelong friend: Roger Payne, the marine biologist who introduced the world to whale song.

Justice, feminism, freedom and cheap horror thrills make for an exciting month of reading.

The second novel from the co-host of the “Who? Weekly” podcast follows a West Village writer in the early 1990s and today.

Three editors gather to discuss 10 books they’re looking forward to over the next several months.

Watch for new books by J. Courtney Sullivan, Kevin Barry and Casey McQuiston; re-immerse yourself in beloved worlds conjured by Walter Mosley, Elin Hilderbrand and Rebecca Roanhorse.

Memoirs from Anthony Fauci and Anna Marie Tendler, a reappraisal of Harriet Tubman, a history of reality TV from Emily Nussbaum — and plenty more.

In a new book, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci recounts a career advising seven presidents. The chapter about Donald J. Trump is titled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.”

Recommended reading from the Book Review, including titles by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Elliot Page, Binyavanga Wainaina and more.

A scion of wealth claimed self-defense and invoked a sinister blackmailing ring. But, James Polchin asks, what did they have on him?

Kids don’t need to know what zydeco is, or that Mandy and the Meerkats are a nod to Diana Ross and the Supremes, to dig this spoof of vintage vinyl.

Margaret Atwood and John Banville are among the authors who have sold their voices and commentary to an app that aims to bring canonical texts to life with the latest tech.

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

In “The Fall of Roe,” Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer explain exactly how Roe v. Wade was made — and unmade.

To write “Exhibit,” the queer novelist says she had to pretend that no one would read it. “By writing things I’m afraid of saying, I might stand a chance of voicing what I, too, really need and long to see in words.”

A theoretical physicist-turned-sociologist, he upended his field by focusing on social networks to explain how society works. His writing was compared to James Joyce’s.

Bill Hall, the proprietor, has assembled a vast collection of hard-to-find fashion books and magazines coveted by designers and influencers.

In “When the Clock Broke,” John Ganz shows how a decade remembered as one of placid consensus was roiled by resentment, unrest and the rise of the radical right.

This trio of novels ushers readers into three different but equally mesmerizing long-ago worlds.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs reveals a society on the verge of cataclysm in his new novel, “Gretel and the Great War.”

Mr. Potter narrated the epic sagas of popular comic book heroes and villains on his channel Comicstorian.

At the Cato Institute, he argued against government interference in Americans’ lives, including policing their drug use, and supported legal equality for gay people.

Jake Gyllenhaal steps in for Harrison Ford in a new, highly strung adaptation of Scott Turow’s legal thriller for Apple TV+.

Fred C. Trump III’s “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way” will hit shelves July 30.

Young, single and broke, a new mom finds creative ways to stay afloat in Rufi Thorpe’s deft comic novel “Margo’s Got Money Troubles.”

Her first novel, “Ask Me Again,” follows a young woman from high school in New York City to an elite university, to her early adulthood among the political class in Washington, D.C.

In Nicola Yoon’s first novel for adults, “One of Our Kind,” a woman finds that a lush California suburb is not what it seems.

In “The Uptown Local,” Cory Leadbeater describes his years as the late writer’s assistant and companion. Yet the fond portrait reveals more about him than her.

The pandemic fueled a boom in social justice movements and indie bookstores. The two come together in these worker-owned shops.

Try your hand at uncovering a reading list of thrillers in this Title Search puzzle.

Her new novel, “Parade,” considers the perplexity and solipsism of the creative life.