11 New Books We Recommend This Week

I WAS BETTER LAST NIGHT: A Memoir, by Harvey Fierstein. (Knopf, $30.) In his memoir, the actor, author and consummate New Yawker Fierstein appears again on rising up within the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, his earliest experiences with dress-up and make-believe (he now acknowledges that he was a “7-year-old gender warrior”) and his smash successes in “Torch Music Trilogy” and “La Cage Aux Folles.” It’s a “heat and enveloping” memoir, our critic Alexandra Jacobs writes, with two sides to it: “One is a uncooked, cobwebby story of anger, harm, indignation and ache; flip it over and also you get billowing ribbons of humor, gossip and fabulous, hot-pink success.”

GIRL IN ICE, by Erica Ferencik. (Scout Press, $27.) Ferencik, who units her thrillers in excessive landscapes, has positioned this one at a local weather analysis station within the Arctic Circle. There somewhat lady has been discovered frozen within the ice, very a lot alive, talking an unknown language. As a linguist makes an attempt to speak along with her, it turns into clear that nothing lower than the destiny of the earth could also be at stake. “Like Peter Höeg’s ‘Smilla’s Sense of Snow’ and Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life,’ ‘Woman in Ice’ makes use of the subtleties of translation to attract us into totally different worlds and methods of pondering,” Sarah Lyall writes in her newest thrillers column. “It seems that the phrase for ‘local weather change’ in Inuktun, a language of northern Greenland, interprets to ‘a pal appearing unusually,’ which is unhappy and apt.”

SECRET IDENTITY, by Alex Segura. (Flatiron, $27.99.) On this intelligent homage to traditional noir — partly a love letter to New York Metropolis within the seamy Nineteen Seventies, in addition to an immersive tutorial in comic-book publishing of that period — a younger lady investigates the homicide of a colleague. “Witty and wholly authentic, the ebook can also be surprisingly shifting,” Sarah Lyall writes in her thrillers column. “It’s a delight to see Carmen push again in opposition to the informal sexism of the period.”

THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM: Reimagining Power Sickness, by Meghan O’Rourke. (Riverhead, $28.) For many of her 30s O’Rourke was terribly sick, with unusual neurological spasms and abrupt agonizing sensations that generally confined her to mattress for days on finish; her memoir of the expertise, in probing the hyperlinks between sickness and the self, turns into nearly existential. O’Rourke deftly avoids each cynicism and romanticism, Andrew Solomon writes in his evaluation, “reaching an authentically authentic voice and, maybe extra startlingly, an authentically authentic perspective. A poet by alternative and an interpreter of medical doctrine by necessity, she brings a chic self-discipline to her description of a horrific decade misplaced.”

THE BEAUTY OF DUSK: On Imaginative and prescient Misplaced and Discovered, by Frank Bruni. (Avid Reader, $28.) In 2017, Bruni, a longtime editor, critic and columnist at this newspaper, had a stroke whereas sleeping and woke as much as discover he couldn’t see properly out of 1 eye. Decided to not let blindness leach the aim or pleasure from his life, he started in search of the counsel of others who had confronted comparable bodily declines. “What makes ‘The Fantastic thing about Nightfall’ way more outstanding than one man’s overcome life’s cruelties is how Bruni persevered,” Min Jin Lee writes in her evaluation. “This isn’t the unhappy story of a person who misplaced his sight; it’s the beneficiant narrative of a pupil who sought knowledge when trials appeared in his life.”