NYT Books

In her children’s stories, Clarice Lispector disguised philosophical questions in cheerful, kooky fables about exuberant animals with places to be.

Vincenzo Latronico’s novel “Perfection” explores the capital of Europe’s expat scene in its heyday.

His memoir “Growing Up” depicted her hometown “like a shining city on a hill.” Other authors who mean a lot to the musician (and now children’s book writer): Kevyn Aucoin and Hilary Mantel.

Mistakes happen, he theorized, because multiple vulnerabilities in a system align — like the holes in cheese — to create a recipe for disaster.

She explored tensions among the social classes and within families in fiction that prompted Roddy Doyle to call her “Ireland’s greatest writer.”

New accounts of working in a man’s world — and that world’s comeuppance — are long on boldface names and even longer on personality.

What started as a scholarly study becomes, in Will Rees’s hands, a freewheeling journey into our brains and souls.

In “Stag Dance,” Torrey Peters probes the complicated, evolving realities of queerness and trans life.

He conjured fantastical worlds with covers for novels by Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke. He also left his mark on albums by Fleetwood Mac and Rod Stewart.

In more than a dozen books, he created characters who were obsessed with maps, urban walking, sexual fetishes and Volkswagen Beetles.