NYT Books

In “Splendid Liberators,” Joe Jackson presents the U.S. wars in Cuba and the Philippines as part of a misguided project to spread freedom across the world.

“Minor Black Figures” encompasses race, class, religion and art, but at its heart it’s really about “what happens when you encounter a priest at a bar one hazy summer night in New York.”

In “The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus,” Matthew Restall explores the seemingly immortal reputation of one of history’s most projected-on figures.

In Jacqueline Harpman’s novel “Orlanda,” the repressed half of a woman’s soul jumps into the body of a man. Chaos ensues.

In a new biography, “It Girl,” the journalist Marisa Meltzer makes a case for the doe-eyed style icon as more than a muse.

To write “Paper Girl,” Beth Macy returned to Urbana, Ohio, documenting the descent of a once flourishing town into entrenched poverty and acrimony.

In “The Conservative Frontier,” Jeff Roche makes the case that the modern Republican Party was born in West Texas.

In “Race Against Terror,” Tapper makes a courtroom drama out of the strange case of a jihadi fighter who turned himself in.

Her first and only collection of short fiction, gleaned from her archive, pulses with energy and struggling characters.

In the autofictional “Death and the Gardener,” the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov remembers an ordinary man ennobled by a love of the land.