NYT Books

“It is perhaps the most relaxing thing that I’ve ever done,” says the actress, whose new book of essays is “Lifeform.” She thanks her own mother for the gift of Margaret Atwood.

She wrote lovingly and often hilariously about her harrowing childhood in a working-class Southern family, as well as about the violence and incest she suffered.

What a 19th-century Swiss novel, and a young fan’s pilgrimage to the Alps, taught me about fatherhood.

Most bets were on Percival Everett’s “James,” but the judges chose Harvey’s “beautiful, miraculous” novel, which is set aboard a space station.

“The Impossible Man,” by Patchen Barss, depicts the British mathematical physicist and Nobelist Sir Roger Penrose in all his iconoclastic complexity.

Most bets were on Percival Everett’s “James,” but the judges chose Harvey’s “beautiful, miraculous” novel, which is set aboard a space station.

“Set My Heart on Fire” follows a young woman through a world of drugs, music and highly conditional relationships.

Esther Kinsky reflects on the nature of seeing in a book about an old cinema in Hungary.

In “Four Points of the Compass,” Jerry Brotton explores the disorienting, dizzying history of our relationship to direction.

Sergio De La Pava’s novel “Every Arc Bends Its Radian” is a detective story that takes a strange turn in Colombia’s dark underbelly.