NYT Books

“Set My Heart on Fire” follows a young woman through a world of drugs, music and highly conditional relationships.

Esther Kinsky reflects on the nature of seeing in a book about an old cinema in Hungary.

In “Four Points of the Compass,” Jerry Brotton explores the disorienting, dizzying history of our relationship to direction.

Sergio De La Pava’s novel “Every Arc Bends Its Radian” is a detective story that takes a strange turn in Colombia’s dark underbelly.

In “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem,” Rob Sheffield chronicles how Taylor Swift has made fans, foes and even journalists part of her story.

He memorably portrayed a frizzy-haired science teacher roping her elementary school class into adventures aboard a shape-shifting yellow bus.

In a new biography, Peter Ames Carlin chronicles the rise of an indispensable band and the evolution of its music.

In his latest book, the Rolling Stone writer David Browne tracks three decades of folk, blues, rock and jazz below 14th Street.

In a dual biography, the journalist Lili Anolik casts the two writers as opposite sides of the same ambitious, 1960s-Hollywood coin.

In “Stranger Than Fiction,” Edwin Frank maps a path from Dostoyevsky to Sebald, finding mystical power and surprising ties among 20th-century writers.