Book Reviews

Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

The 1943 Turkish classic follows a hopeless love story against the backdrop of a crumbling Weimar Berlin.

Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism” argues for reviving a sense of rootedness and a web of reciprocal obligations.

In her Crime column, Marilyn Stasio also heads to Bel-Air (Thomas Perry), Florida (Tim Dorsey) and Detroit (Stephen Mack Jones).

Nuruddin Farah’s “North of Dawn” bears witness to the tensions between fundamentalism and secularism, through the lens of a Somali-Norwegian family.

Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.

Sandeep Jauhar’s exploration of our most vital organ and favored metaphor is our January pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

In my “Read this” and “I have a book for you” family, no one had ever mentioned Murdoch. Her novels weren’t part of our approved canon. And yet I adored her.

The stories in “At the End of the Century” — all character studies — have an addictive, told-over-tea quality.

New translations include a lush historical novel about Michelangelo, a hybrid memoir/novel from a Nobel Prize winner and a mother-daughter melodrama.

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

The author, most recently, of the novel “An Orchestra of Minorities” is “hardly turned off by considerations of genre. … I have found even manuals — of how to hunt wild birds in West Africa — fascinating.”

When he died in 2016, the singer left behind hundreds of notebooks that have yielded material for a new miscellany, “The Flame.”

“The War Before the War,” by the literary critic Andrew Delbanco, is a forceful and eloquent case for the role of fugitives in fomenting a national crisis.

In culinary essays, Dawn Drzal, Christine S. O’Brien and Ann Hood embark on personal journeys in which meals reveal much more than what’s on the menu.

A selection of books published this week; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.

Book publishing is big on TV and in the movies. The essayist Sloane Crosley, a former book publicist, fact-checks the shows.

Rob Dunn’s “Never Home Alone” catalogs the world of microbial beings that share our living space and inhabit our showerheads and pillowcases.

In “Born to Be Posthumous,” Mark Dery probes the “eccentric life” and “mysterious genius” of the illustrator whose books have proved fiendishly irresistible.

Yascha Mounk discusses Edward J. Watts’s “Mortal Republic,” and Jonathan Lethem talks about the surge of fictional psychotropic drugs in novels.