NYT Books

Cynthia Carr’s compassionate biography chronicles the brief, poignant life of the transgender actress Candy Darling, whose “very existence was radical.”

For Iman Mersal, the slim novel was “life altering.” She narrates her journey in the footsteps of its largely forgotten author in “Traces of Enayat.”

Maya Van Wagenen, the author of “Chronically Dolores,” shares her favorite young adult books that authentically represent being a teenager living with illness.

She became an award-winning author of children’s books and young-adult novels despite debilitating health issues and the murder of her father.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s “God, Justice, Love, Beauty”; Barbara Vine’s “A Dark-Adapted Eye”

Annabelle Tometich’s “The Mango Tree” provides an unvarnished look at her mother, who shot a BB gun at the truck of a purported fruit thief.

“Table for Two” is a collection of six stories and a novella set in two very different cultural capitals.

In Carys Davies’s latest novel, a financially struggling pastor is dispatched to a remote island to evict its lone resident.

He conceived an early version of cyberspace and predicted the “technological singularity,” a tipping point at which machines would become smarter than humans.

The micro becomes macro in Tal Danino’s surreal, mesmerizing photographs of bacteria.