Nine new books recommended by the editors of The New York Times Book Review this week.
BLACK HOLE BLUES: And Other Songs From Outer Space, by Janna Levin. (Knopf, $26.95.) Levin’s chronicle of the decades-long development of a machine that detects gravitational waves astutely profiles brilliant scientists at work.
SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS, by Carlo Rovelli. Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. (Riverhead, $18.) A whirlwind tour of some of the biggest ideas in physics, in clear, elegant prose.
ALICE & OLIVER, by Charles Bock. (Random House, $28.) A couple with a new baby struggle against the wife’s leukemia in this autobiographical novel by the author of “Beautiful Children.”
HYSTOPIA, by David Means. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In Means’s stunning novel within a novel — presented as the work of a Vietnam veteran shortly before his suicide — a program to erase the memories of war has unintended results.
OLD AGE: A Beginner’s Guide, by Michael Kinsley. (Tim Duggan, $18.) A wryly realistic look at the boomer generation’s looming fate, informed by Kinsley’s experience with Parkinson’s disease.
DODGERS, by Bill Beverly. (Crown, $26.) Several Los Angeles teenage boys, ordered by a drug dealer to murder a witness, embark on a life-changing cross-country drive in this splendid crime novel.
WILL DO MAGIC FOR SMALL CHANGE, by Andrea Hairston. (Aqueduct, paper, $21.) A girl seeks her identity amid griots and ghosts, a warrior queen and a shape-shifting alien in this complex tale.
ALL THE POEMS OF STEVIE SMITH, edited by Will May. (New Directions, $39.95.) The most complete collection of the great poet’s startling oeuvre.
BLUE LAWS: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015, by Kevin Young. (Knopf, $30.) Young celebrates black cultural traditions with swagger.
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