NYT Books

In Kerry Cullen’s uncanny debut, “House of Beth,” a queer 20-something finds that “straight” life comes with serious strings (and spirits) attached.

Our critic on the month’s best new novels.

The Tale of Wade, twice referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems, survives only in a tiny fragment. Two academics argue a scribe’s error deepened the confusion around it.

In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “The Bewitching,” a graduate student stumbles into a haunting conspiracy while researching a cult writer.

In “The Club,” Jennifer Dasal investigates a refuge for (some) expat artists in the City of Light.

The journalist Tim Weiner investigates the mishaps that ensued when American intelligence scrambled to remake itself after the fall of communism.

In “The Aviator and the Showman,” Laurie Gwen Shapiro tells the story of the doomed pilot’s marriage to “the publishing world’s P.T. Barnum.”

Her heritage, as a scion of Boston Brahmins and the mother of biracial children, shaped a discursive verse style that veiled sharp edges and melancholy resolutions.

Dino Buzzati’s best works evoke the fabulism, paranoia and allegory of writers like Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Italo Calvino.

Kashana Cauley’s novel “The Payback” imagines a world where the Debt Police are real, and they’re into reiki.