NYT Books

In “The Wounded Generation” and “1942,” the historians David Nasaw and Peter Fritzsche show how civilians struggled with the long tail of the war.

Gabrielle Hamilton’s new memoir, “Next of Kin,” lacks the visceral shock and searing vision of her prior work.

In “The Unveiling,” a tortured film location scout is haunted by a traumatic past and a supernatural present.

The devil, Prada-clad or not, stays on the periphery of Caroline Palmer’s “Workhorse,” a novel about an ambitious assistant at a Vogue-like publication.

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.