New York Times - Top Stories

In this sequel to “Harlem Shuffle,” Ray Carney, a furniture salesman in 1970s Harlem, returns to the “secondary economy” to get tickets to a Jackson 5 concert for his daughter. Through robberies, shotgun rides and neighborhood fires, the novel is “a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game,” our reviewer wrote.

Ackerman delves into human mythologizing, present-day scientific understanding and looming threats to the 260-odd species of the elusive bird. Owls, she writes, exist “on every continent except Antarctica and in every form in the human imagination.”

In 2016, a high school teacher named Max goes on a road trip with his newly zombified ex-girlfriend. In the 1800s, a boardinghouse proprietress wrote mournful diaries grieving former residents. When Max’s brother, dying in a Bronx hospice center, finds the diaries, zombies and ghosts meet in this “fluky, fitfully funny and folk-horror-adjacent” novel, our reviewer wrote.

Named for the year when a British ship first landed in colonial Virginia carrying some 20 people kidnapped from Africa, this collection of essays, poetry and fiction investigates the enduring legacy of American chattel slavery.

Framed as a dubiously ethical journalistic investigation into the gruesome torture and murder of a 16-year-old girl in northern England, Clark’s second novel “shrewdly turns her own lens onto us, onto our obsession with true crime and our complicity in the industry it has spawned,” our reviewer wrote.

After graduating from a women’s liberal arts college, Flannery moved to Los Angeles and took a job at American Apparel — and found a reality far from the glamorous, feminist workplace the company had promised. Her memoir’s “currency is the prickly panic of realizing your life doesn’t match your principles, spiked with salacious specifics,” our reviewer wrote.