Alexandra Jacobs

Fights, feuds and insults are all in a day’s work for Ari Emanuel, who offers an unvarnished look at his rapacious career in a new memoir.

In an impressive change of pace, Emma Cline’s new novel gets inside the head of a stoic businessman with dementia.

Julie Kliegman’s thorough biography of the transgender tennis player is fascinatingly complicated by her changed stance on gender and sports.

Though full of details that echo the life and career of Natalie Portman, “Life of M” remains chilly and abstract.

In “The Story of Your Life,” Kathryn Jezer-Morton explores, without castigating, the wish to present a curated version of experience via social media.

In “Transcription,” Ben Lerner considers a famous father, a loyal protégé and a distant son, bound by devotion and separated by miscommunication.

Sure, “Catcher in the Rye” has its detractors. But the influence of its wised-up yet winningly innocent hero keeps it among the Great American Novels.

In Daniel Mason’s charming “Country People,” a stuck father and his happier family are tempted, and changed, during a stint on a bucolic campus.

In “Empire of Ink,” Alex Wright describes how newfangled technologies and disruptive personalities have regularly unsettled the American media.

In John Lanchester’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” a widow is unnerved when a hit TV series airs details from her marriage a little too closely.