SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary, by Lorrie Moore. (Vintage, $17.) Moore is perhaps better known as a novelist and short story writer than a critic, but readers of her fiction will recognize her engaging and approachable voice. Her first nonfiction collection brings together pieces touching on everything from Marilyn Monroe to the O.J. Simpson trial, along with book reviews and political pieces.
THE GUNNERS, by Rebecca Kauffman. (Counterpoint, $16.95.) A group of childhood friends reunites for a funeral and tries to imagine what drove their classmate to kill herself. Times reviewer Xhenet Aliu praised the novel, writing, “There’s so much generosity and spirit and humor shared by whatever characters are on the page at any given time that I was always happy to accompany them.”
THE PLANT MESSIAH: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species, by Carlos Magdalena. (Anchor, $16.) Magdalena, a senior botanical horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, takes readers from the Amazon to the Australian outback on his quest to preserve some of the most vulnerable plants on the globe. Back at his lab, he designs ways to save these species, encouraging them to thrive and breed.
NO ECHO: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel, by Anne Holt and Berit Reiss-Andersen. Translated by Anne Bruce. (Scribner, $17.) When the body of a celebrity chef in Oslo is discovered on the steps of the police headquarters, the department scrambles to investigate the killing. Hanne, the heroine of these popular Norwegian crime novels, joins the case after six months in mourning for her partner. As she looks into the murder, it becomes clear that, for all his fame, the chef was a mystery, even to those closest to him.
TO END A PRESIDENCY: The Power of Impeachment, by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. (Basic, $17.99.) The authors are constitutional law experts and outline the history of impeachment while taking care to explain the critical questions that arise at each step of the process. Both Tribe and Matz are close observers of the Trump presidency, and they make a case for when impeachment ought to be used in the 21st century.
THE ITALIAN TEACHER, by Tom Rachman. (Penguin, $16.) Pinch, the title character, grew up under the specter of his father, a larger-than-life artist whose affections were always out of reach. “Rachman appears in perfect control of his material,” Times reviewer Olga Grushin wrote. “This is not an aesthetic treatise but, first and foremost, a morality tale about fame and family.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.