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Two Hollywood classics released just a decade apart, two superlative poets joined in friendship and legacy — how often do books about cultural pillars of the American 20th century arrive so neatly paired? Our selections this week feature satisfying studies of “High Noon” and “Casablanca,” and innovative biographies of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Fiction lovers will welcome new work by Jim Shepard, David Grossman and Mohsin Hamid. When you’ve finished reading, go out and take a walk: in the city (“Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London”) or in the country (“The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative”). It’ll do you good, we promise.
EXIT WEST, by Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead, $26.) Hamid’s urgent and moving allegory of war, love and refugees envisions an interconnected world in which East and West inevitably meet. A young couple fleeing their war-torn country encounter three doors to possible futures, which Hamid probes with gentle optimism.
Radhika JonesEditorial Director, Books
DIVIDED WE STAND: The Battle Over Women’s Rights And Family Values That Polarized American Politics, by Marjorie J. Spruill. (Bloomsbury, $33.) The National Women’s Conference in 1977 was both a high-water mark of political feminism and a turning point, evoking a socially conservative backlash that stymied legislative gains and overtook the Republican Party. This relevant account draws on rigorous research by Spruill, a historian.
EXIT WEST, by Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead, $26.) The new novel by the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” mixes global unrest with a bit of the fantastic. Saeed and Nadia leave an unnamed country in the midst of a civil war and journey — through magical doorways — to Greece, England and eventually the United States. Our critic Michiko Kakutani said that Hamid “does a harrowing job of conveying what it is like to leave behind family members, and what it means to leave home, which, however dangerous or oppressive it’s become, still represents everything that is familiar and known.”
HARMLESS LIKE YOU, by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. (Norton, $24.95.) In Buchanan’s lyrical and endearing first novel, a Japanese teenager searches ecstatically for artistic self-actualization in the bohemian New York of the 1960s and ’70s.
A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR, by David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Knopf, $29.95.) Grossman’s magnificently funny, sucker-punch-tragic novel about a tormented stand-up comedian combines comic dexterity with a Portnoyish level of detail. It offers a rich and complete portrayal of Israeli society through an exploration of humor from the edge of the grave.
THE NIGHT OCEAN, by Paul La Farge. (Penguin Press, $27.) La Farge’s provocative, intricately plotted novel focuses on the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Dashing and cleverly imagined, it is part literary parody, part case study of the slipperiness of narrative.
ELIZABETH BISHOP: A Miracle for Breakfast, by Megan Marshall. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) This smooth and brisk presentation by a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of one of America’s most accomplished poets is enriched by recently discovered documents. Interweaving her own experience as a student of Bishop’s in the 1970s, Marshall skillfully discerns echoes between Bishop’s public and private writing.
EVERYTHING BELONGS TO US, by Yoojin Grace Wuertz. (Random House, $27.) The intertwined lives of South Korean university students provide intimacy to a rich and descriptive portrait of the country during the period of authoritarian industrialization in the late 1970s. Wuertz’s debut novel is a “Gatsby”-esque takedown, full of memorable characters.
ROBERT LOWELL, SETTING THE RIVER ON FIRE: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character, by Kay Redfield Jamison. (Knopf, $29.95.) For decades, on and off, the poet Robert Lowell suffered from extreme bipolar disorder; he composed many of his best verses while stark raving mad. This “psychological account,” as Jamison calls it, of the life and mind of a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner is also a narrative of his illness, drawing on fascinating research collected by an authority on mood disorders.
LOWER ED: The Troubling Rise Of For-Profit Colleges In The New Economy, by Tressie McMillan Cottom. (New Press, $26.95.) Cottom, a sociologist, has written the best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students, most of whom wind up with high debt and inadequate training. These institutions are likely to enjoy loosened regulations under President Trump.
HIGH NOON: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic, by Glenn Frankel. (Bloomsbury, $28.) With a sure ear for anecdote and a good eye for detail, Frankel presents the background and historical context of the timeless 1952 western, whose making was shaped and given meaning by HUAC’s attack on the film community. The conservative Gary Cooper emerges as a hero in life as well as onscreen.
OTHER PEOPLE: Takes And Mistakes, by David Shields. (Knopf, $28.95.) The novelist’s essays and fragments, written over 35 years, are funny, vulnerable and triumphantly humane.
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE CASABLANCA: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie, by Noah Isenberg. (Norton, $27.95.) Nobody involved with “Casablanca” had high expectations for the picture. In this treasure trove of facts and figures, Isenberg tells the story of its script, casting, production and the inevitable squabbling over credit, all by way of accounting for the film’s surprising and enduring popularity.
FISH GIRL, by Donna Jo Napoli. Illustrated by David Wiesner. (Clarion, $17.99; ages 10 and up.) A mermaid imprisoned in a boardwalk aquarium gains courage from a friendship with a human girl her age and manages to escape to a life outside. This unsettling graphic novel is an unusual coming-of-age tale.
THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE: Stories, by Mariana Enriquez. Translated by Megan McDowell. (Hogarth, $24.) The girls and women in this collection worry about the usual stuff — their friendships, their figures, their waning attraction to boyfriends and husbands — only to confront the horror that courses underneath it all. This Argentine writer’s stories are propulsive and mesmerizing, laced with vivid descriptions of the grotesque and the darkest humor.
LIFE ON MARS, written and illustrated by Jon Agee. (Dial, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) A young astronaut, armed with a box of chocolate cupcakes, searches for life on Mars in Agee’s quirky picture book. We are left with fresh questions and mysteries about our ultimately unknowable and inexhaustibly interesting universe.
THE WORLD TO COME: Stories, by Jim Shepard. (Knopf, $25.95.) Shepard’s deeply researched tales pack weight and validity, and the collection displays a dizzying range of time and place, from the tale of an auxiliary Roman legionnaire to one set in a British submarine. Whatever the era, his basic point is this: before you ship out (or under), cherish every bit of warmth and respite, every gesture of love.
THE FULL REVIEWS OF THESE AND OTHER RECENT BOOKS ARE ON THE WEB: NYTIMES.COM/BOOKS.
FLÂNEUSE: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, by Lauren Elkin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Strolling the city isn’t just for men. Elkin, who learned the pleasures of aimless urban wandering in Paris, combines memoir and travel writing with capsule biographies of walking women like Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and George Sand.
THE NATURE FIX: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, by Florence Williams. (Norton, $26.95.) The Romantics were right: the virtues of nature provide a strong antidote to the viciousness of industrialization. Williams, a contributing editor at Outside magazine, presents the benefits of spending time outdoors — “the more nature, the better you feel” — entertainingly but with enough scientific detail to satisfy the expert.
