THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, by Antonio Damasio. (Vintage, $17.) Damasio, a well-known neuroscientist, makes a case for the centrality of feelings and emotions in human history. Unlike other accounts that focus on cognition and are largely unconcerned with the role of affect, his book reframes the history of humans and the natural world, putting feelings at its core.
THE PISCES, by Melissa Broder. (Hogarth, $16.) In this darkly funny novel, a depressed and stalled graduate student finally meets her dream date — who turns out to be half fish. As New York Times reviewer Cathleen Schine put it, Broder “approaches the great existential subjects — emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, death and boyfriends — as if they were a collection of bad habits.”
SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean. (Grove, $17.) In breezy biographical chapters on 10 writers, including Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Pauline Kael, Dean explores their successes and failures and their relationship to feminism. Above all, she considers the double-edged nature of the word “sharp”: It’s a compliment with an undertow of terror, she writes. “Sharpness, after all, cuts.”
THE IMMORTALISTS, by Chloe Benjamin. (Putnam, $16.) In late 1960s New York, the Gold children visit afortuneteller known for predicting the dates when people will die. The four siblings grapple with the prophesies over the next 50 years: One heads West for San Francisco, and another becomes a scientist, researching the possibility of living forever. For each, the knowledge turns out to be both a blessing and curse, and all must try to balance their desires and choices with their predetermined destinies.
NO ASHES IN THE FIRE: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, by Darnell L. Moore. (Bold Type, $16.99.) Growing up gay and black in Camden, New Jersey, Moore had a brutal, violent childhood. In his book, he sets out to make visible the “forces that rendered my blackness criminal, my black manhood vile, my black queerness sinful,” he writes, but despite the cruelty he faced, he suffuses his memoir with humanity.
THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, by Alan Hollinghurst. (Vintage, $16.95.) Hollinghurst’s emotionally resonant novel charts nearly a century of queer life and desires in Britain. When readers meet the title character, he’s an object of intense desire among a group of male friends at Oxford. Years later, a sex scandal torpedoes his political career, leaving his gay son to claim the possibilities his father never had.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.