NYT Books

John Birdsall’s “What Is Queer Food?” and Erik Piepenburg’s “Dining Out” both seek to define the place of cuisine in queer culture, history and expression.

Two children’s novels take a gimlet-eyed look at the price of gifts with “no strings attached.”

In V.E. Schwab’s “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” three women turned into vampires are thrown into a centuries-long drama of love, power and hunger.

In a new memoir, Geoff Dyer reflects how seemingly trivial moments and objects of childhood end up playing an outsize role in our lives.

In “The Haves and Have-Yachts,” the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos presents an urbane set of profiles in excess.

In Jess Walter’s new novel, “So Far Gone,” a retired environmentalist turned recluse comes out of isolation to find his grandchildren.

“Murderland,” by the Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser, considers possible links between the region’s industrial pollution and its most infamous murderers.

In S.A. Cosby’s new book, “King of Ashes,” an investment banker returns home to protect his family from a local gang.

In “Submersed,” Matthew Gavin Frank takes on the undersea universe of amateur submarine enthusiasts — and one obsession turned deadly.

Beginning with a reading by Dylan Thomas, she and a friend found unlikely commercial success in the 1950s with recordings of famous writers reciting their work.