Books

“User Friendly” is an insider’s history of design, highlighting triumphs and catastrophes, foibles and advancements, a new benchmark in the study of user experience.

In “The Indispensable Composers,” Anthony Tommasini of The Times brings to bear wide personal experience, extensive knowledge, an approachable teaching style, and deep fondness for the material in taking us on a delightful journey.

A little beat up, a little worn down, getting long in the tooth, Sam Acquillo’s back for another seat-of-the-pants investigation into depravity.

The new Pushcart Prize table of contents lets us know that authors are thinking about drug overdoses, racism, cultural appropriation, caring for elderly family members, and the complicated political divide.

“Mag Men” by Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser, the formidable graphic designers whose work with New York magazine left a huge imprint on American journalism, adds to the bleak realization that an era has ended, but what a wonderful retrospective of a 50-year legacy of art direction this is.

The incredible journey of a refugee Iraqi cat is out in a $7.99 paperback edition, and a Star “Guestwords” and book review contributor makes good with a collection of his own.

From Mary Gaitskill’s novelistic reconsideration of the #MeToo movement to Elton John’s hilarious self-mockery, our man in letters picks ’em . . .

This heroic story, an uplifting portrait and an engaging account of a glamorous age, also shows what happens when a unique individual who finds acceptance overseas runs headlong into American racism.

The big story Paul Tough tells in “The Years That Matter Most” is about the failure of higher education in the 21st century to provide equal opportunity to all segments of American society. But it will lead you to reflect on your own academic experience, too.

Michael Bloomberg, the larger-than-life former mayor of New York, ubiquitous and initiative-heavy, has no greater fan than Eleanor Randolph, journalist and now biographer.

What’s different about Alan Furst’s latest World War II tale of espionage is its hero — a rank amateur, a naive neophyte, and, like his creator, a writer of spy novels.

From Guild Hall’s new poet-in-residence, who will read a selection of her work Friday night at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Generous, encouraging, and nothing if not thorough, “Pity the Reader” is a kind of fiction writer’s chapbook, using the great satirist’s comments as a jumping-off point to address the budding writer’s most basic concerns.

“Selected Shorts,” the radio and stage show from Symphony Space, is coming to the Avram Theater at Stony Brook Southampton on Saturday to honor one of the college’s own, the late comic essayist David Rakoff.

Louis Begley wraps up his Jack Dana crime novel series in the most gruesome way imaginable.

In “Guestbook” Leanne Shapton tells stories composed solely of visual art or photographic images or prose, or an interplay of all three, inviting the reader to participate in rendering the unseen.

James Zirin prosecutes the case against Trump by picking apart a pattern of behavior — contentious real estate dealings, legendary unpaid debts, the unsuccessful casino gamble in Atlantic City, the Trump University fraud, and boorish misogyny.

When they became the new owners of Canio’s Books in 1999, Kathryn Szoka and Maryann Calendrille didn’t just buy a business; they bought into a community.

“Chicken Soup for the Soul” meets “The Twilight Zone” is the vibe in John McCaffrey’s new short volume of 11 brief stories.

Gary McAvoy’s ironically titled new book accuses Truman Capote of guilt by omission in the writing of “In Cold Blood,” and says the recently discovered notebooks of Harold Nye of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation contain smoking-gun evidence.

A master of audiobooks voice work will do what he does best — speak — about his craft and career at the library in Amagansett. Colson Whitehead, meanwhile, makes it onto another long-list for a top award.

Richard Panchyk has put together a kind of visual reference guide using Army Air Service photos from the 1920s to 1940, and Long Island, from Queens to Montauk, never looked better.

Alafair Burke, a talented author of domestic noir, is back with “The Better Sister,” exploring sibling rivalry and the dark underbelly of family life.

Paul McCartney, Amagansett resident and grandparent (and wasn’t he with some band once?), has just come out with his first picture book, “Hey Grandude,” while the McMullans return with a tale of two French bulldogs and Susan Verde brings a heart-restorative “I Am Love” for worried kids.

“The Great American Sports Page” has Mike Lupica on the brother of a football-playing fireman killed on 9/11, Robert Lipsyte on Dick Tiger, a boxer with a championship belt and a champion's conscience, and the timeless hyperbole of Grantland Rice.

John O’Malley’s “Urethane Revolution” is a surprisingly compelling and sometimes moving firsthand history of how the development of urethane wheels took skating to where it is today — a cultural phenomenon and, as of next summer, Olympic sport.

We’ll never tire of Elvis, and, when it comes to rock ’n’ roll, he represents the exponential leap from what was to what is, a point that is well made in Richard Zoglin’s “Elvis in Vegas,” which chronicles the King’s return to live performing from the self-imposed gulag of his B-movie-making period.

Michael Shnayerson’s “Boom” traces the growth of a burgeoning postwar art world and its expansion into the head-spinning mega-market it is today, fueled by insatiable collectors, resourceful, combative art dealers, and a shifting array of artists.

The 12 linked stories in Joel Mowdy’s debut collection offer a 1990s tour of young lives in a place not so very far from the Hamptons, but very far indeed psychically and economically.

From Lucas Hunt’s latest thematically linked collection of poems, “Hamptons,” published by Thane & Prose.