NYT Book Reviews

The lexicographer Kory Stamper’s “True Color” is a sneakily insightful philosophical treatise on what it means to define anything at all.

Matt Phelan’s bear cub named Bartleby and Scott Rothman’s judgy bunny aren’t wicked or misbehaved. Like our reviewer, they simply prefer not to.

In anticipation of the nation’s 250th anniversary, a Pulitzer winner visited 300 sites to see how history is displayed and, sometimes, erased.

The sloppy, solipsistic narrator of Kirsten King’s novel, “A Good Person,” casts a witchy spell on a guy who dumped her. Hours later, he’s been stabbed to death.

Yann Martel’s “Son of Nobody” joins many recent books that reimagine the classics, but offers a Nabokovian twist.

Samuel Pepys’s journals are an invaluable record of British history. A new book reconsiders his infamous sexual exploits.

Part horror, part fable, the latest novel by Marie NDiaye to be translated into English is an exacting portrait of domestic entrapment and psychological turmoil.

In “Transcription,” Ben Lerner considers a famous father, a loyal protégé and a distant son, bound by devotion and separated by miscommunication.

“The Keeper,” the final book in her Cal Hooper trilogy, returns readers to an insular village in rural western Ireland.

Philip Stead’s “A Potion, a Powder, a Little Bit of Magic” gleefully ignores all the storytelling rules.

In a new book, the historian Mark Peterson argues that our founding document is rooted in ideals of expansion and conquest ill suited to the nation we’ve become.

A new history by Trevor Jackson argues that the economic system that transformed global living standards depends on endless growth impossible to sustain.

In “How Flowers Made Our World,” David George Haskell makes a case for their soft power.

Just in time for Opening Day, Robert Coover’s prescient 1968 baseball novel is back in print.

“American Men,” by Jordan Ritter Conn, and “Who Needs Friends,” by Andrew McCarthy, report from the front lines of the epidemic of male loneliness.

In a new book, the Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber suggests how Americans targeted during the Red Scare used literature to confound their interrogators.

“Open Space,” by David Ariosto, suggests there are few limits on human ingenuity that could prevent us from colonizing the cosmos.

A new book by Rhae Lynn Barnes examines how minstrelsy once occupied the center of the nation’s cultural life.

In Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s novel “Almost Life,” a passionate love affair between two college women gives way to a lifetime of what-ifs.

In “Playmakers,” Michael Kimmel traces, and celebrates, the immigrant roots of the American toy industry. (Batteries not included.)

In “The Feather Wars,” James H. McCommons pays tribute to the nation’s first conservationists.

As his new memoir demonstrates, he himself would achieve fame as a visual artist, filmmaker, TV host and formative tastemaker.

“Paradiso 17,” by Hannah Lillith Assadi, considers the toll of displacement through the tale of a Palestinian émigré.

A new book by the historian Christopher Clark chronicles a nearly 200-year-old scandal with echoes of the present day.

Joshua Bennett’s two new collections, “We” and “The People Can Fly,” take different paths to the same destination.

In “Chain of Ideas,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that a modern form of xenophobia has come to dominate conservative movements across the world.

In a new book, Caroline Tracey explores the mysteries and beauty of salt lakes.

Mieko Kawakami’s novel “Sisters in Yellow” follows a group of dreaming and scheming young women through society’s margins.

In “Stay Alive,” Ian Buruma paints a picture of the city dwellers who survived in Germany under the Nazis.

A new history by Luke Barr chronicles the innovations, excesses and chauvinism of the French chefs who spawned a revolution in cooking.

Charlotte Wood’s “The Natural Way of Things” conjures a not-so-implausible world in which girls and young women are thrown into prison for their sexual shames.

From 1940 to 1973, Ursula Nordstrom transformed kids’ books into real art and big business. A new middle grade biography attempts to capture her magic.

Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel, “Night Night Fawn,” approaches a closed-minded matriarch with compassion, even at her child’s expense.

In an affecting new memoir, Tom Junod, a prizewinning magazine writer, grapples with unsettling discoveries about his larger-than-life dad.

From his perch in Hawaii, the hero of Patricia Finn’s first novel, “The Golden Boy,” revisits his dark past in rural Ontario.

“Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” is a familiar reminder that growing up in showbiz can lead to awards and adulation, but also to heartache.

Karan Mahajan’s new novel, “The Complex,” tracks the fortunes of a political family in a rapidly changing India.

In Andrew Martin’s keenly observed new novel, a group of friends navigate a society reshaped by the pandemic.

“Nonesuch,” the new novel by Francis Spufford, conjures a plot laced with magic to change the course of history.

In “Whidbey,” three women reckon with the aftermath of sexual assault.

“Gunk,” a novel by Saba Sams, follows a woman through the trials and tenuous jobs of young adulthood.

A newly released collection of the Australian master’s short fiction shows her sympathy, her virtuosity and her ear.

In “Chosen Land,” Matthew Avery Sutton argues that, despite the intentions of certain founders, the First Amendment guaranteed that the United States would be a godly country.

In “Days of Love and Rage,” Anand Gopal creates an indelible portrait of revolution and civil war in Syria.

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s new novel, “Lake Effect,” is the latest in a specific contemporary subgenre: “Four Adult Siblings Reconvene to Rehash Their Privileged but Fraught Adolescence.”

In “Reproductive Wrongs,” the classicist Sarah Ruden traces efforts to exert political control over family planning back 2,000 years.

A new book by the journalist Beth Gardiner argues that oil companies are upping production of the material as a safeguard against falling revenue.

Ivana Sajko’s novel “Every Time We Say Goodbye” explores personal and political crises in lengthy, lyrical sentences.