NYT Books

A taboo-busting Brooklyn memoir, a tender Japanese novel about the beauty of connection, a book by a death doula: Editors and writers from around the newsroom describe their favorite books of the year.

The celebrated Harlem Renaissance author was inspired by her experiences as a mixed-race teenager and young adult in the Danish capital, a time that informed her 1928 novel, “Quicksand.”

With “Context Collapse,” Ryan Ruby aims to explain poetry’s origins and its waves of innovation all the way to the present.

“I’m like one of those deranged soldiers they find on some remote island still fighting a war that’s ended decades ago,” he says. “A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!” is his collection of comic fiction.

Leanne Morgan went from helping her husband sell mobile homes to sudden success in her 50s.

In “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George.

In Ella Baxter’s novel “Woo Woo,” a feminist performance artist starts to question herself on the eve of a provocative solo exhibition.

Our columnist on the month’s best new releases.

Walter Mosley talks about how his fictional hero frees himself from wage labor through America’s favorite side hustle: landlording.

In “Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife” the historian Hetta Howes seeks to relate to figures of the past.