New York Times Book Reviews

Salman Rushdie on a “dazzling” debut novel, Bret Easton Ellis, the birth of American Modernism and more.

Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

Bharara discusses “Doing Justice,” and Senator Doug Jones talks about “Bending Toward Justice.”

“Where the Crawdads Sing,” which came out last August, got an initial boost from Reese Witherspoon. It’s now sold over 1.5 million copies.

The graphic novelist Box Brown looks at the government report that anticipated our current debates about the legalization of weed.

On the cusp of their teenage years, the protagonists of these novels deal with death in the family, remembered childhood trauma and many varieties of parental pressure.

“The Age of Disenchantments,” by Aaron Shulman, chronicles the turbulent lives of Leopoldo Panero, the unofficial poet laureate of Francoism, and his wife and children.

In Julie Langsdorf’s “White Elephant,” Nickolas Butler’s “Little Faith” and Benjamin Markovits’s “A Weekend in New York,” you’ll find squabbling siblings, rebellious daughters and more.

“Putin’s World,” by Angela E. Stent, seeks to put Russia’s relations with the West into long-term perspective.

In “America’s Jewish Women” Pamela S. Nadell offers a sweeping historical tour, moving from colonial times through the feminist struggles and until today.

Etaf Rum’s “A Woman Is No Man” unsnarls the dark knot of history, culture, fear and trauma that shapes the experiences of three generations of one family.

The collection “Rag,” by Maryse Meijer, is rife with blood and violence — much of it inflicted by men on women. In the world of her fiction, there is no desire without pain.

Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.

There’s something for everyone here: 17th-century English witches, haunted portraits, Victorian ghost tales and a moldering Eastern European castle.

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

In “Thin Blue Lie” Matt Stroud untangles the web of law enforcement agencies, for-profit corporations and politicians that have put technology at the center of policing.

In “The Old Drift,” Namwali Serpell spins a multigenerational, magical-realist tale of the East African nation from colonialism to the future.

The author, most recently, of “The Overstory” was from an early age a “fan of awe”: “I liked reading about diatoms and stars, things from four hundred million years ago or a hundred thousand years from now.”

The scholar and host of the PBS series “Reconstruction,” whose latest books are “Dark Sky Rising” and “Stony the Road,” is a productive beach reader: “I read more during two months on the Vineyard … than I do the entire rest of the year.”

In Jenna Glass’s new novel, a spell giving women control over their own fertility has far-reaching consequences.