Books

Erica Abeel’s novel “The Commune” takes place in the summer of 1970, during the lead-up to the Women’s Strike for Equality, and recognizable literary figures abound as second-wave feminism comes in for some lumps.

In Amanda Fairbanks’s “The Lost Boys of Montauk,” a tragic story of guilt, remembrance, and blame, the prose moves fast, secrets are exposed, and regrets over talking to a reporter loom.

“Lilyville,” Tovah Feldshuh’s memoir, is like a theater piece, full of shtick, one-liners, speeches, Yiddishisms, and the joys and sorrows of family life. The author knows a dramatic arc.

Gabrielle Bluestone’s “Hype” is about would-be internet entrepreneurs who set out to defraud as many people as they can with the promise of “the next big thing,” which of course turns out not to exist. It’s awfully timely.

What makes Erika Hecht’s “Don't Ask My Name” different from its many companions among Holocaust survival memoirs is the dynamic between the author and her mother, and the account of the mother’s ruthless determination to save her family.

A new poem from Fran Castan, the author of “The Widow’s Quilt” and “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” has just won the United Kingdom’s 2021 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

Flynn Berry’s “Northern Spy” is a contemporary thriller about a single mother, her infant son, and her sister, and yet it illuminates much about the inner workings of the Irish Republican Army and British MI5.

The first thing to know about Amanda M. Fairbanks and her new book, "The Lost Boys of Montauk," a true tale of a 1984 commercial fishing disaster, is that it comes out on Tuesday from Gallery Books.

In her new book, “Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast,” Cynthia Saltzman traces a High Renaissance work — Paolo Veronese’s “The Wedding Feast at Cana” — from its inception to its role in the rise of the French Republic, uncovering it as a symbol of victory and cultural entitlement.

Bill Henderson, the publisher of the Pushcart anthology of the best of the small presses, will be honored with an Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in an online ceremony on Wednesday, May 19.

David S. Reynolds’s massive new biography argues that the traditional view of Abraham Lincoln’s relationship to the economy and society of his times is wrong — he was very much connected to both, and in ways relevant to today.

The architecture critic Paul Goldberger lays out how one man, David Walentas, saw the potential in a derelict warehouse district on the Brooklyn waterfront. And the desirable enclave Dumbo was born.