This posthumous novel collects 50 comic set pieces on life’s absurdities: here an homage to Rimbaud, there a nod to Bellow.

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Paul Theroux casts himself as a character in this tantric mystery novel about a travel writer at the end of his rope.

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This tender, humane novel, set in Southern California, follows a suburban family that starts falling apart when a real estate deal goes bad.

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Peter Hessler chronicles the effects of China’s expanding road network on individual lives.

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This account of Willie Mays’s career concentrates on the baseball brilliance, reminding us of when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.

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Ted Conover’s globe-spanning travelogues can be fascinating in themselves, and his meditations on highways are thoughtful, temperate and generous.

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This novel of a New York courtship is an homage to the filmmaker Eric Rohmer and to Marcel Proust.

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A novel that combines newsroom drama, espionage and military adventure.

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The tough Newfoundlander heroine of Lisa Moore’s new novel is haunted by the death of her husband.

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Robert Harris’s latest historical novel follows Marcus Tullius Cicero through the dangers of his consulship.

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Thomas Lynch, a poet and a mortician, looks unblinkingly at death. But nihilism is nowhere in these stories, and love is everywhere embraced.

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A history of the Chinese immigrants who streamed to America in the wake of the California gold rush.

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Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard, argues that public policy should be based on social scientists’ understanding of what makes us happy.

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Jerome Charyn imagines an Emily Dickinson consumed with obsessive desire for a handyman, a scholar and other fictional men.

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Recounting the Clinton vs. Starr clash, a law professor creates a case study in political excess.

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Justin Taylor’s sharp first story collection documents the confusion of being young, disaffected and human.

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This version of the “Odyssey” claims to be based on fragmented narratives unearthed from an ancient rubbish mound.

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Peter Handke’s novel of Don Juan ponders beauty and eternity — and it’s not about sex.

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A provocative survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success — and why that success led to so much misfortune.

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In Cathleen Schine’s novel, two sophisticated Manhattan sisters, one wildly emotional, one smartly sensible, come to the aid of their beloved aging mother.

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A memoir by an aide who assisted in the rise of John Edwards — and played a key role in the scandal that brought him down.

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The history of an early-20th-century crusader against a rubber baron’s abuses in the Amazon.

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David R. Dow is a Houston lawyer. His dark, raw memoir exposes death-penalty machinery that can’t be mediated by truth, logic or fact.

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A woman kidnaps her own 5-year-old and heads south with her boyfriend, causing headaches for all involved in this taut novel about letting go.

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Adam Haslett meditates on the financial crisis through this timely novel’s protagonist, one of the brains behind a rotten banking conglomerate.

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