NYT Books

These days, readings in the city can require tickets and be just as hard to get into as a trendy restaurant.

In Clare Beams’s eerie new novel, “The Garden,” nefarious things are afoot.

Richard Goodwin, an adviser to presidents, “was more interested in shaping history,” she says, “and I in figuring out how history was shaped.” Their bond is at the heart of her new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.”

John Schu is a best-selling author, a children’s librarian and a tireless evangelist for the power of a blank page.

“I mean that as an organizing principle,” says the U.S. poet laureate, who has edited a new anthology of nature poetry called “You Are Here,” “and also as a slight against prose.”

Crafting the arguments in “You Get What You Pay For,” her first essay collection, “felt like pulling apart a long piece of taffy,” says the author of “Magical Negro.”

Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it in comics this month.

Men’s personal narratives are dissected; women’s are “dismissed as merely autofiction or memoir,” says the author of “The Light Room: On Art and Care.” Her 2012 “Heroines” has just been reissued.

Some familiar San Franciscans turn up in the British countryside in “Mona of the Manor,” which the author vows is the 10th, and last, in the series: “That has a nice symmetry.”

The feisty title character of her new book, “Ferris,” has a sharp eye for detail, and so, its author hopes, does she. Meanwhile, she is on an Alice McDermott reading jag.