NYT Books

An intense exchange with Marilyn Monroe sounds silly. But in a new book, Justin Smith-Ruiu is dead serious about what we might learn from altered states.

A hands-free “pulley system, or crumbs brought to me by little doves, or something,” would help. Her new novel is “Will There Ever Be Another You.”

In “Night Watch,” Kevin Young riffs on Dante’s “Inferno” and gives voice to silenced figures from the nation’s past.

Inspired by his parents’ travels, he spent much of his life in Africa and helped complete his father’s safari memoir. He also published a volume of father-son letters. He was Ernest Hemingway’s last surviving child.

Patrick Bateman, the titular ‘American Psycho’, was written as satire. He’s also the inspiration for a new perfume and bar.

A poet and memoirist as well, she drew a wide readership with her historical fiction, notably with a post-Civil War tale that was adapted for a movie starring Tom Hanks.

David Gate has a popular following online, but his best poems suggest he’s not entirely comfortable as an influencer.

He championed works of cinema that were destined never to have a commercial breakthrough — which, to him, was the whole point.

John Koethe spent decades as a philosophy professor. The poems in his latest collection, “Cemeteries and Galaxies,” are full of reflection and digression and probing.

As an author (often blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction), a film director, a lyricist and a host of TV and radio shows, he sought to capture his epoch.