“Murderland,” by the Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser, considers possible links between the region’s industrial pollution and its most infamous murderers.
His go-to classic is by Joseph Campbell, and he admires “Brothers and Keepers” and “The New Jim Crow” on incarceration. “The River Is Waiting” is his new novel.
Poetry and translation are both about picking the just-right word. But reading multiple translations makes an implicit case for celebrating abundance and variety.