NYT Books

“Saturday Night Live” turns 50 this year, and a monumental biography of the man who created it attests to his enduring role as America’s impresario of funny.

In “Summer of Fire and Blood,” Lyndal Roper tells the story of the serfs who fought for a better life and the elites who co-opted their movement.

The writer Kelsey McKinney tries to wrestle with our guiltiest pleasure.

John Broderick’s “The Pilgrimage” plumbs the rich interior lives of a devout gay man and his wife, without judgment.

In the psychological thriller “Casualties of Truth,” by Lauren Francis-Sharma, a woman and a country are both forced to face the harrowing violence that has shaped them.

In “Talk to Me,” Rich Benjamin investigates his family’s harrowing past to better understand the troubles that continued to plague them.

Two new novels riff on fairy tales to explore mothers with unusual hungers and daughters trying to survive them.

In Callan Wink’s new novel, two brothers struggling to make ends meet are forced to turn to shady ventures.

The taut, disturbing stories in Bob Johnson’s “The Continental Divide” share the setting of a rural hamlet in Indiana — and transcend it.

In Charlotte Wood’s novel “Stone Yard Devotional,” an atheist burrows into herself while staying in a convent, and contemplates how to live without causing harm.