WINNER of the U.K.’s Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award in America, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain is perhaps the bleakest great novel to appear in a long time. It is the bleakest, most shocking, and most harrowing account of a childhood I’ve ever read, …

RESIST EVERYTHING Except Temptation is a careful consideration of Oscar Wilde’s philosophical underpinnings. Through a close examination of his writings and political affiliations, Kristian Williams discovers a deep affinity for anarchism.

In his powerful debut novel The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr., depicts in exquisite, often excruciating, detail the social ruination that slavery brought to the antebellum South.

Drag Queens and Beauty Queens is an ethnographic study that analyzes the symbiotic relationship between a “pair of spectacles”: the 100-year-old Miss America pageant (which Greene calls a “performance of gender” that’s “understood by gays as essentially a camp performance”) and its “drag counterpart,” the Miss’d America pageant.

            Deep Song, a title borrowed from Lorca’s own work, starts with Lorca’s “García” roots in the countryside of southern Spain, a blended zone with many Arabic influences. It is also a place of interconnected family and business relationships. Some of these were helpful to the young writer and some ultimately fatal, Roberts argues with evidence gathered from multiple sources and laid together like the mosaics of Andalusia.

            “Beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching,” Mendelsohn observed in An Odyssey. “For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too.” Mendelsohn’s latest book achieves just that. Three Rings is not a book for everyone. But for readers who can’t help pondering how we make meaning of the motley mosaic of life, it is a delightful odyssey.