Books

In Laurie Gelman’s latest, Jen Dixon, spin-class leader and matchmaker, parent and power emailer, is back to face down her domestic and school fund-raising challenges with a sly wit.

Fathers and sons will relate to this harrowing literary memoir, but so will woodworkers, boatbuilders, and anyone who fled the rural heartland for an East Coast education. This is a writer to root for.

A new poem by Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning East Hampton poet.

These are unfinished, previously unpublished works of a prolific poet who was known for being “obscure,” but what they offer, thanks to Emily Skillings, the volume’s editor, is a far deeper understanding of John Ashbery’s process and what mattered to him as a writer.

Jeffrey Garten, an economist who served in four presidential administrations, argues that a single weekend at Camp David in August of 1971 was “a watershed in modern American history” and an indication of “changing American power and influence.”

Take them out to the ballgame . . .

Erica Abeel’s novel “The Commune” takes place in the summer of 1970, during the lead-up to the Women’s Strike for Equality, and recognizable literary figures abound as second-wave feminism comes in for some lumps.

In Amanda Fairbanks’s “The Lost Boys of Montauk,” a tragic story of guilt, remembrance, and blame, the prose moves fast, secrets are exposed, and regrets over talking to a reporter loom.

“Lilyville,” Tovah Feldshuh’s memoir, is like a theater piece, full of shtick, one-liners, speeches, Yiddishisms, and the joys and sorrows of family life. The author knows a dramatic arc.

Gabrielle Bluestone’s “Hype” is about would-be internet entrepreneurs who set out to defraud as many people as they can with the promise of “the next big thing,” which of course turns out not to exist. It’s awfully timely.

What makes Erika Hecht’s “Don't Ask My Name” different from its many companions among Holocaust survival memoirs is the dynamic between the author and her mother, and the account of the mother’s ruthless determination to save her family.

A new poem from Fran Castan, the author of “The Widow’s Quilt” and “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” has just won the United Kingdom’s 2021 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.