Ensaf Haidar has had to watch from Canada, where she lives in asylum, as her husband was flogged for criticizing Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment.
Books of The Times: Review: ‘Zika’ Tracks the Trajectory of an Epidemic
This book is Donald G. McNeil Jr.’s take on a virus that went from being associated with a corner of Brazil to what is now a worldwide concern.
Books of The Times: Review: ‘Landmarks,’ a Book on Language and Landscape
The British academic, nature writer and word lover Robert Macfarlane makes a passionate case for restoring the “literacy of the land.”
Fiction: Two Suspense Novels Track Down Girls Gone Lost
Amy Gentry’s “Good as Gone” and Megan Miranda’s “All the Missing Girls” are stories told in reverse.
Fiction: Who Killed the Priest? An Inquisition Mystery Gets Its Confession
In Matthew Carr’s “The Devils of Cardona,” a priest’s murder draws investigators into the tensions of Inquisition-era Spain.
Fiction: Lee Child on a Thriller Set in Zimbabwe
The mysterious author C.B. George’s novel, “The Death of Rex Nhongo,” set in unstable Zimbabwe, is primarily about people going about their lives.
Fiction: In Megan Abbott’s New Murder Mystery, a Teenage Gymnast Sharp as a Knife
Megan Abbott’s “You Will Know Me” is set in the world of young gymnasts and their obsessive parents.
Paul Beatty and Elizabeth Strout Among 13 on Longlist for 2016 Booker Prize
Other authors in contention for the prestigious award include J.M. Coetzee, Ottessa Moshfegh and Ian McGuire.
Books of The Times: Review: The Radical Transformation of Patricia Hearst
Jeffrey Toobin’s “American Heiress” gives new resonance to an American crime story that had tremendous notoriety in the 1970s.
Tim LaHaye Dies at 90; Fundamentalist Leader’s Grisly Novels Sold Millions
Dr. LaHaye, an evangelical minister and prolific writer, was co-author of the apocalyptic “Left Behind” novels and promoted traditional conservative organizations.
Ivory Tower: Deep Thinking About Immigration
Immigration is an emotional issue. Three new books offer rational perspective.
Books of The Times: Review: ‘The Wicked Boy,’ a Young Killer’s Twisty Path to Atonement
Kate Summerscale resurrects a notorious true-life tale of murder in the Victorian era committed by a 13-year-old boy.
Author’s Note: To a Writer, a Body of Work Is a Taunt
Authors look at their own work and think: Is that all there is?
Nonfiction: Watching Brazil’s Rich: A Full-Time Job
Years of covering Brazil’s tycoons yield Alex Cuadros’s “Brazillionaires,” a collage of immense wealth and government corruption.
Marvel’s World of Wakanda Will Spotlight Women, on the Page and Behind It
This new series will feature the feminist writer Roxane Gay and the poet Yona Harvey, who will join Ta-Nehisi Coates to create spinoff Black Panther narratives.
A Hollywood Start-Up Sees New Life in Dead Movie Scripts
With the coming release of “Coin Heist,” Adaptive Studios will test its idea of turning neglected Hollywood scripts into books and movies.
Newly Released: Review: Books by Amie Barrodale, Joy Williams, Hubert Mingarelli and Rikki Ducornet
A short-story collection; an assortment of vignettes; a novel set in World War II; and a story whose protagonist hides out in a college are recent offerings.
Beijing Journal: Unearthing China’s Past at a Market Whose Raffish Air Is a Selling Point
Collectors of rare books and posters find gems in Panjiayuan’s ramshackle alleyways, or make discoveries in its more exclusive little shops.
Israeli Defense Minister Compares Beloved Palestinian Poet to Hitler
Avigdor Lieberman, an ultranationalist, said that Army Radio should not have aired a show about Mahmoud Darwish, who is considered the Palestinians’ national poet.
Letters to the Editor
Readers respond to a recent review of Mark Danner’s “Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War” and more.
Paperback Row
Seven new paperbacks to check out this week.
Editors’ Choice
Nine new books recommended by the editors of The New York Times Book Review this week.
Open Book: Sci-Fi in Bulk
“The Big Book of Science Fiction” is nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries and lesser-known authors.
Nonfiction: A Fond Look Back at the International Jet Set in Old Shanghai
Taras Grescoe’s “Shanghai Grand” is a love song to “the wicked old Paris of the Orient.”
Nonfiction: Reconsidering the Work of a Chinese Immigrant Writer of the 1930s
In “A Floating Chinaman,” Hua Hsu revisits a Chinese immigrant writer who could not surmount ethnocentrism and racism.
Poetry: Time-Traveling Poems Consider the Self in Its Many Guises
The poet Jana Prikryl’s debut, “The After Party,” elevates the everyday and nods to influences from the past.
Fiction: A Novel Explores Tragedy’s Aftermath in a Colombian-American Family
For the family in Patricia Engel’s “The Veins of the Ocean,” the past infects the present when a violent act is repeated.
Fiction: A Debut Novel Traces a Woman’s Life in Solitude
The linked vignettes in Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Pond” trace the streaming thoughts of a solitary woman.
Fiction: Outlaws Like a Good Book Too
Donald Ray Pollock’s “The Heavenly Table,” a raw, riotous satire set in the rural South of 1917, takes aim at literary snobbery.
Fiction: Jesse Ball’s New Novel Features a Teenage Arsonist
The unhappy protagonist of Jesse Ball’s “How to Set a Fire and Why” joins an “arson club.”
Fiction: A Second Mississippi Novel by Brad Watson
Brad Watson’s “Miss Jane” imagines the ways a real woman with a birth defect insisted on her humanity in the old South.
Fiction: A Novel of Egypt’s ‘Cheated Generation’
Yasmine El Rashidi’s “Chronicle of a Last Summer” is about a heroine’s path to adulthood during and after Mubarak.
Inside the List
Daniel Silva’s “The Black Widow,” No. 1 in hardcover fiction, opens with an ISIS bombing in Paris. “I wrote this book as a warning about what was coming,” Silva says.
Inside The New York Times Book Review Podcast: Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘We Are Not Such Things’
Justine van der Leun talks about “We Are Not Such Things”; and David Goldblatt discusses “The Games: A Global History of the Olympics.”
Crime: The Latest and Best in Crime Fiction
Bill Loehfelm’s “Let the Devil Out,” Joseph Finder’s “Guilty Minds” and more.
Live From Prison, Oscar Wilde’s Letter
Patti Smith, Colm Toibin and others will read from “De Profundis,” a meditation by Wilde, in the prison in Reading, England, where he wrote the work.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Lewis and Zadie Smith to Appear at 92nd St Y
The literary season at the Y will kick off on Sept. 19 with Ian McEwan, in the only New York reading from his new novel, “Nutshell.”
Books of The Times: Review: In Liane Moriarty’s ‘Truly Madly Guilty,’ a Very Unfortunate Barbecue Indeed
Liane Moriarty’s new novel, heavy on contrivance, centers on a bad afternoon in suburban Sydney.
Board Recommends Releasing Detainee Who Wrote ‘Guantánamo Diary’
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose best-selling memoir recounted abuse by American interrogators at the prison in Cuba, has denied involvement in terrorism.
Trump Lawyer Sends ‘Art of the Deal’ Ghostwriter a Cease-and-Desist Letter
Tony Schwartz, who spoke to The New Yorker magazine about his experiences with Mr. Trump, said the letter demanded he forfeit all royalties from the book.
By the Book: Megan Abbott: By the Book
The author, most recently, of “You Will Know Me” keeps a copy of “How to Protect Yourself Against Psychic Attack” on her shelves. “Those who know me well probably wouldn’t be surprised.”
Fiction: Dave Eggers’s New Novel Follows a Family Into the Alaskan Wild
In Dave Eggers’s “Heroes of the Frontier,” a single mother imagining a new life takes her kids on the lam in Alaska.
Books of The Times: Review: John Cage’s Historical Niche, a Legacy in Letters
Decades after this composer’s death, it is easier to recognize his indispensability and his place in the development of 20th-century music.
Carolyn See, Author of ‘Golden Days,’ Dies at 82
The novelist often put portraits of intimate relationships and sociological observations of the lives of Angelenos together with grander fictional ideas.
John Gruen, Cultural Renaissance Man, Dies at 89
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