recommended

In July 2020, protests against social justice shook the nation, Joshua Katz, a professor at Princeton Classics, wrote in a small influential journal that some of Princeton's anti-racism faculty proposals would provoke a "civil war on…

Young mungo, By Douglas Stuart (Grove, 27.) Her booker-winning debut, as tender, heartbreaking and provocative as "Shuggy Ben," brings Stuart's second novel back to Glasgow in the 1980s, and the impossible intensity of first love. In the…

Legacy of Violence: History of the British Empire, By Caroline Elkins. (Knopf, $ 37.50.) Elkins, a Harvard professor who won the Pulitzer Prize for the 2005 history of British oppression in colonial Kenya, "Imperial Reckoning", expands his…

RHYME's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry, By Brad Leithauser (Knopf, 30.) The Guide to Poetic Techniques, which also seeks to preserve the form, provides metrics, poems, verses, and other chapters to explain how the verse works and why we…

John WilliamsAssistant Editor, BookLucky break, By Yevgenia Belarusets. Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky. (New Directions, Paper, 14.95.) These offbeat stories - about the effects of the war on poor women in Ukraine's industrial east -…

Rebellion, By Joseph Roth. Translated by Michael Hofmann. (Everyone's Library, 24.) Andrew Pum, the protagonist of Roth's recently released 1924 novel, lost a leg during World War I. He doesn't really mind. He believes in the God of…

What happened to win it: The history of the Democratic Party, By Michael Cousin. (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $ 35.) Cajin's clever, absorbing volume traces the 200-year history of the "world's oldest people's party", which has seen its…

Life without children: stories, By Roddy Doyle (Viking, 25.) Doyle's latest book is a collection of stories set during the recent lockdown; Its desolate environment has dark powers, and Irish flexibility is everywhere. Many stories show…