11 new paperbacks to add to your bookshelf

Fiction

Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac

This novel by Jack Kerouac’s only child, originally published in 1981 and long out of print, has now been reissued by New York Review Book Classics. Jan Kerouac met her father only twice, and this novel draws on the details of her own relatively brief life (she died at 44 in 1996), a peripatetic, intoxicated one lived on society’s margins. In her introduction, Amanda Fortini writes: “Jan lived, not entirely by choice, the kind of hardscrabble life her father contrived for literary reasons. Still, one sees in her novel certain aspects of his best-known works, chiefly their restless journeying, experimental prose, rejection of traditional or materialist values, and a commitment to freedom and spontaneity as vital principles of life and art.”

Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet

“My name is Malcolm MacPhee,” the narrator of Burnet’s short novel says at the outset. “If you’re wondering why it falls to me to tell this tale, it is for no other reason than this — I am the only one left.” What follows is based on a real event in 1857, when a laborer named Angus MacPhee murdered his parents and an aunt on the remote Scottish island of Benbecula. Burnet based his intense psychological thriller, in part, on 130 pages of witness testimony from the time.

Choice by Neel Mukherjee

Mukherjee’s fourth novel is composed of three thematically linked stories that raise questions about living ethically in the contemporary world. The Guardian said the book, while philosophically oriented, is “never without fiction’s traditional pleasures, from the close social observation of rural Bengal to delicate evocations of London.”

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

The latest by the acclaimed and beloved Erdrich fuses humor and sorrow in telling the story of a farming community in North Dakota’s Red River Valley. The story revolves around Kismet, a teen girl with dreams of escaping that community. But first she must figure out what to do about the two boys who love her. “This is not a teen novel in the traditional sense, but it’s a novel that focuses with unusual depth and compassion on the lives of teenagers,” The Washington Post’s Ron Charles wrote. “How each of them rises to the occasion — some heroically, some timidly — offers the kind of hope that feels rare these days.”

Rental House by Weike Wang

Wang’s third novel is a funny, perceptive look at what it means to defy societal expectations. Keru and Nate are knocked for a loop when a couple they meet on vacation call them the “textbook example of a DINK family” (double income, no kids). The comment sends them, bearing down on 40, into a crisis of soul searching, wondering whether it would be better to bring children into the world. “As in any good novel,” Porter Shreve wrote in Book World, “the answers are few, but the questions multiply.”

Nonfiction

Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher

The iconic singer and actress covers the first three-plus decades of her life in this opening installment of a planned two-volume memoir. (The second is scheduled to arrive next fall.) She was born in 1946. Her father was a smooth-talking Armenian heroin addict who left shortly after she was born. Her mother was an aspiring entertainer from Arkansas who worked at an all-night diner. Between Cher’s childhood and 1980, when this book ends, she dropped out of high school; met, married, became famous alongside and divorced Sonny Bono; and established herself as a solo star.

Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson by Ted Geltner

Geltner, whose previous work includes a biography of the Southern writer Harry Crews, here tells the life of Johnson, the author of “Jesus’ Son,” “Tree of Smoke,” “Train Dreams” and other acclaimed books who died in 2017 at 67.

How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch

Since his death in 2021 at 91, much has been written about the great composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s life and work. But Schoch’s book differentiates itself by delving into Sondheim’s musicals to reveal the composer’s humanist side, and how Sondheim the man informed Sondheim the artist. Schoch dedicates each chapter to one of his subject’s beloved shows, including “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Into the Woods.”

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank

Frank, founder of New York Review Books Classics, brings the eclectic and searching spirit of his publishing line to this study of the novel throughout the 20th century. It is a history of books — by H.G. Wells, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison and a host of others — and a way to tell the history of, as Frank writes, “a century to boggle the mind, which demanded and stretched and beggared description.” In The New Yorker, Louis Menand called it an “ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious” project.

Watching the Detective by Deborah Shapiro

Novelist Shapiro turns to nonfiction in this combination of memoir and cultural criticism. Inspired by a recent year when she watched episodes of “Columbo” nearly every night, the charmingly digressive book considers Peter Falk’s portrayal of the title character; the show’s treatment of policing, Los Angeles, family and mystery; and Shapiro’s relationship with her own family and coming of age.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from French by John Lambert

The “V13 trial” weighed the guilt of 20 men accused of participating in the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 that killed 130 people. The inimitable French journalist, memoirist and novelist Emmanuel Carrère attended the proceedings nearly every day of their 10-month duration, starting in September 2021. His resulting book-length account is about the convolutions of suffering and how the trial helped people come to terms with the event. In Book World, Becca Rothfeld called it an “extraordinary and generous” work.