NYT Books

At a time when, in his words, “nobody was writing about gay life,” he produced groundbreaking novels and memoirs and published books by Harvey Fierstein and others.

Hamid Rahmanian has made it his life’s work to share the richness of Iranian culture. “Song of the North,” at the New Victory Theater, is just the latest installment.

In “Red Scare,” Clay Risen shows how culture in the United States is still driven by the political paranoia of the 1950s.

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.