Alexandra Jacobs

“American Canto,” published amid a scandal over the journalist’s alleged romantic entanglements with politicians she covered, offers many scenes but little sense.

Carla Kaplan’s biography “Troublemaker” focuses on the fierce political commitments of the journalist best known for “The American Way of Death.”

At its best, Joy Williams’s “The Pelican Child” is delightfully unhinged; at its worst, willfully weird and repetitive.

Learned, lively and often irreverent, David McWilliams’s “The History of Money” is rich with surprising details about currency, then and now.

Three new stories, including a campus-set novella, are the heart of “The Eleventh Hour,” a book that strains to recall the author’s richest work.

In “When All the Men Wore Hats,” Susan Cheever considers her father as a writer and a role model, recounting the stories behind his celebrated stories.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous “Nobody’s Girl” doesn’t break political news, but might break your heart.

In the autofictional “Death and the Gardener,” the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov remembers an ordinary man ennobled by a love of the land.

A crackling new biography captures the formidable personality and often eerie writings of the “Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” creator Muriel Spark.

In “What’s With Baum?,” an anxious, jealous and thrice-married writer finds himself stranded in a culture that wants more “schmaltz,” less “wisdom.”