In John Banville’s novel, a crew of Greek deities attends a mathematician’s deathbed.

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Modern profiles and historical sketches animate a moonshine enthusiast’s study of homemade liquor.

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This darkly humorous satiric novel, a witty paean to white-collar loserdom, stars a deeply cynical academic fund-raiser fighting for his job.

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The life and hard times of the country singer Tammy Wynette.

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Gina Ochsner’s first novel links the grim anomie of post-Soviet Russia to the delirium of magic realism.

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An exploration of the force of spirituality, by a veteran student of life’s fragility.

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An epic novel of rock ‘n’ roll, from its glory years to the guttering and sputtering of the music industry.

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A rich history of the development of forensics in New York, by a Pulitzer-winning science writer.

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A biography of the talented and tempestuous Nina Simone.

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This collection’s characters circle a disturbing truth: the power to shape our lives can be as terrifying as it is liberating.

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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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