NYT Books

At its best, Joy Williams’s “The Pelican Child” is delightfully unhinged; at its worst, willfully weird and repetitive.

Our columnist on three novels thrumming with menace.

Even the previously uncollected work in “The Poems of Seamus Heaney” shows a master craftsman in full control of his powers.

In “The Fire,” the reporter Cecilia Sala travels to Iran, Ukraine and Afghanistan and follows her generation into the fray.

The unlikely collaboration of two academics, “Convent Wisdom” provides unholy guidance by intertwining religious history with popular culture.

In “Crick: A Mind in Motion,” the British biologist Matthew Cobb provides a biography both vivid and authoritative.

In “Baldwin: A Love Story,” Nicholas Boggs focuses on the writer’s romantic relationships. In this episode he explains their importance to Baldwin’s life and work.

His new novel, “Palaver,” observes how an expat in Japan and his visiting mother find “a new language and way of being that’s amenable for them both.”

In Derrick Barnes’s fantastical tale, a 13-year-old Black football star is idolized by his town’s mostly white inhabitants, until they turn on him.

“Come See Me in the Good Light” follows the writer and their wife as they experienced the pain of cancer and also the joy of living.