Witt’s boyfriend, Andrew, started behaving erratically when pandemic lockdowns put an end to the underground party scene in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. “Health and Safety” — which braids that scene, Andrew’s breakdown and Witt’s work as a journalist during the first Trump administration — also encompasses a bigger breakdown, one that eroded the boundaries between their subculture and the world at large.

A journalist who grew up in Geneva, Abrahamian explores the spread of freeports, free zones and other “extraterritorial domains” of the sort common in her hometown, all created to benefit wealthy people or countries by offering them special perks or exempting them from local laws and regulations.

Sante, who for decades has been a leading literary and cultural critic, here traces her late-in-life gender transition, reflecting on a career of seeking truths through writing while hiding an important truth about herself. The book vividly presents New York in the 1970s and documents a transformation both internal and external.

Painter, a historian and author who left academia to attend art school at the age of 64, highlights her original mind and irreverent wit in this collection, with reflections on Black American figures including Sojourner Truth, Martin R. Delany and Clarence Thomas, interspersed with artwork by Painter herself.

This panoramic and richly insightful biography tells the full story of the civil rights hero who became a long-serving U.S. representative and a moral force in America. It gives Lewis’s post-civil-rights story the depth of attention it deserves — and shows how this mild-mannered seminarian submerged his pacifist tendencies to succeed in the bare-knuckled world of electoral politics.

In this candid, plain-spoken memoir, Rushdie recalls the attempted assassination he survived in 2022 during a presentation about keeping the world’s writers safe from harm. His attacker had piranhic energy. He also had a knife. Rushdie lost an eye, but he has slowly recovered thanks to the attentive care of doctors and the wife he celebrates here.

In this history of New York, Perlin, a linguist, focuses on residents fighting to preserve their spoken heritages. The result is sweeping and intimate, simultaneously a call to arms and a tribute to a place that contains almost as many tongues as speakers.

Crediting the mentors who lifted her up on her path to success, this memoir by the Supreme Court’s newest justice is deeply personal and full of hope, and highlights a fairy-tale marriage to her college boyfriend.

Hylton spent a decade researching the history of Crownsville, a segregated mental hospital that operated in Maryland for 91 years. The result is not just a work of painstaking reporting, but a deeply human, often tragic story of an American failure to care for Black minds and bodies.

Fusing a meditation on the political potential of storytelling with intimate accounts of trips to Senegal, where he visits the former slave-trading center Gorée Island; South Carolina, to support a high school instructor under fire for teaching his prize-winning book “Between the World and Me”; and the West Bank, where he witnesses life under the Israeli occupation, Coates decries injustice and the Western media’s complicity in it.

An Indian investigative journalist, Bhatia watched in dismay as relatives, friends and fellow citizens embraced the increasingly extreme politics of his country’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi. In this ambitiously reported account, he chronicles India’s turn toward authoritarianism and violence through the stories of ordinary people and public figures.

What makes New York baseball unique, the novelist and historian argues in this insightful, beautifully crafted narrative — which concludes with the end of World War II — is its role as a chronicler of cultural change. Whatever baseball’s roots in cow pastures and small towns, it came of age as an urban game.