NYT Books

Works by Jane Godwin, Joshua David Stein and Matthew Diffee find new lenses through which to explore an old subject, in lovely and surprising ways.

James Van Der Zee’s baroque, carefully composed funeral home photos illuminate century-old ideals of mourning and ritual in Black culture.

In the powerful new history “The Zorg,” Siddharth Kara tells a shocking story of mass killing, human baseness and the seeds of conscience.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous “Nobody’s Girl” doesn’t break political news, but might break your heart.

In “Morbidly Curious,” the behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner takes a look at our addiction to the gory, the morbid and the grotesque.

The new and selected poems in Ada Limón’s “Startlement” reveal her to be garrulous, funny and heart-on-sleeve even when she’s being a little wicked.

“I look for the subjective pulse of the author,” says the novelist, hailing Hamsun while sensing “cynicism” in Nabokov. “A Wooded Shore” is his 18th book.

The pop star’s ex-husband Kevin Federline had said in a new book that since her conservatorship ended, “It’s become impossible to pretend everything’s OK.”

“Spunk,” a fable weaving together music and movement, is getting its first full staging since being rediscovered in 1997.

“1929,” by the New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, is a tale of greed, corruption and incompetence to shock the conscience.