FIRE AND FURY: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff. (Picador, $18.) Remember the book that had everyone talking this time last year? In Wolff’s telling, President Donald Trump is a barely literate chief executive who heads up a chaotic, aberrant White House. The anecdotes are entertaining, if deeply unrewarding (and at their worst, thinly sourced). A media reporter, Wolff is strongest on his subject’s insecurities and psychological hang-ups.
THE POWER, by Naomi Alderman. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) One of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017, this novel imagines the sudden emergence of an “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the world. Through the lives of several female characters, the story explores a grim idea: that no one is immune to power’s corruptive effects.
OFF THE CHARTS: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies, by Ann Hulbert. (Vintage, $16.95.) Why do many exceptional children fail to sustain their success into adulthood? Hulbert offers an empathetic view of some child geniuses, including Shirley Temple and Bobby Fischer. She aims to “listen hard for the prodigies’ side of the story,” as she puts it. At the same time, she avoids preachy parenting advice.
THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN: Stories, by Denis Johnson. (Random House, $17.) This posthumous collection takes up many of Johnson’s central themes, including his preoccupation with mortality. Johnson died in 2017, and his impending death is felt on the margins of these last stories, without straying into morbidity. As Times reviewer Rick Moody wrote, Johnson draws on his “singular skill” for revelation to “brighten the interiors of tragedy and help us wave off the vultures hovering above.”
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HIPPIE FOOD: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, by Jonathan Kauffman. ( Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Kauffman, a food reporter, outlines how the counterculture of the 1960s continues to shape American tastes and diets today. Times reviewer Michael Pollan said this entertaining history shows that the hippie ideal “has lost none of its power, and continues to feed a movement.”
THREE DAUGHTERS OF EVE, by Elif Shafak. (Bloomsbury, $18.) At an upscale dinner party in present-day Istanbul, Peri recalls her college days at Oxford, where she and two friends came to be known as the Sinner, the Confused and the Believer. Shafak, one of Turkey’s best-known authors, explores the relationship between faith and doubt in a time of political upheaval.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.