NYT Books

In “Playing for Time,” she recounted how singing in an all-female orchestra while in a concentration camp saved her from death.

Three new books apply an economist’s lens — and language — to some of our most unruly phenomena, including war and nature itself.

In “Playing for Time,” she recounted how singing in an all-female orchestra while in a concentration camp saved her from death.

She was a towering figure in Soviet literature who was once silenced in a Stalinist literary purge.

How hard-boiled language lessons from Adrienne, the motorcycle-riding author of a series of 1970s language books, turned a homebody into an explorer.

In “Why I Am Not an Atheist,” Christopher Beha makes the case for faith.

Mohammed Hanif’s “Rebel English Academy” follows three characters in the politically fraught Pakistan of the late 1970s.

In “Emilio Pucci,” the subject’s niece and her husband explore the early life of the Italian designer who dressed the jet set.

In “Leaving Home,” the writer and illustrator Mark Haddon recasts a painful childhood in kaleidoscopic color.

With matter-of-fact precision, “A Hymn to Life” powerfully chronicles the shock of discovering her husband’s sex crimes, and the rallying cry that followed.