THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Jamison, adding to a large group of addiction memoirs, maps her own recovery while considering the relationship between creativity and substance abuse. The emotional firepower of the book comes in its second half, after she has embraced sobriety; Times critic Dwight Garner called this section “close to magnificent, and genuinely moving.”
LOVE AND RUIN, by Paula McLain. (Ballantine, $17.) McLain’s latest novel, about the marriage between journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, takes up the question that vexed (and probably doomed) their relationship: Why must a woman choose between her career and what her husband wants her to be? McLain drew on primary sources to develop her fiery protagonist.
A WORLD WITHOUT ‘WHOM’: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, by Emmy J. Favilla. (Bloomsbury, $18.) The BuzzFeed copy chief discusses her plan to codify language in a digital era, balancing a need for logic with flexibility to account for how people actually talk. Along with a look at the rules she devised, the book offers a guide to the quandaries we face as the way we communicate online reshapes language itself.
MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT, by Ned Beauman. (Vintage, $17.) Emboldened by “fungal clairvoyance” after inhaling mold in an old temple, a CIA agent tells the story of a fateful meeting in the Honduran jungle in 1938. The novel’s twists and turns touch on everything from colonialism to conspiracy theories. Times reviewer Helene Stapinski called the story “a kitchen-sink sendup of spy novels, 1930s Hollywood and screwball newspaper comedies, with a pinch of Pynchon thrown in for fun.”
ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker. (Penguin, $18.) Pinker sets out to persuade pessimists — people disturbed by today’s threats like climate change and the rise of authoritarian populism across the globe — of one thing: that life has never been better, both in the West and in developing countries. The Harvard psychologist marshals an impressive array of data to back up his claim.
ETERNAL LIFE, by Dara Horn. (Norton, $15.95.) When readers meet Rachel, she’s a suburban great-grandmother in the 21st century. But that life is only the latest in a string of reincarnations, the consequences of a promise she made in Roman-occupied Jerusalem some 2,000 years earlier. Horn’s elegant novel explores how Rachel’s immortality impedes her ability to be fully, truly alive.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.