Book Review

Selected paperbacks from the Book Review, including titles by Darrin Bell, Maggie Smith, David Friend and more.

Bullwinkel’s debut novel sheds light on the culture of youth women’s boxing through an ensemble cast of complicated characters. It packs a punch.

The watercolor cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore.

For Pride Month, we asked people ranging in age from 34 to 93 to share an indelible memory. Together, they offer a personal history of queer life as we know it today.

In “The Singularity Is Nearer,” the futurist Ray Kurzweil reckons with a world dominated by artificial intelligence (good) and his own mortality (bad).

Frederick Seidel’s 19th book, “So What,” is filled with politics, disease, luxury and provocation. At almost 90, he’s one of our best contemporary poets.

Rather than bemoan pop culture’s most divisive genre, Emily Nussbaum spends time with the creators, the stars and the victims of the decades-long effort to generate buzz.

He elevated many of France’s most provocative writers through his publishing house, La Fabrique, but he made his greatest mark as a politically engaged, and strolling, historian of Paris.

In his beautiful memoir, “Do Something,” Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.

Two decades after his death, a collection of over 800 works that the first president of Senegal owned is moving from France to Dakar.