New in Paperback: Haruki Murakami and Richard Thompson

FIRST PERSON SINGULAR: Tales, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. (Classic, 256 pp., $17.) In eight tales, Murakami’s traditional first-person narrators meditate on music, sports activities, reminiscences of youth and extra, usually pivoting between realism and a deeper, philosophical knowledge. As our reviewer, David Means, famous, this assortment “fuses cultures, or maybe leaps over them, defying time, beating like pop songs, touching common nerves.”

BEESWING: Shedding My Means and Discovering My Voice, 1967-1975, by Richard Thompson with Scott Timberg. (Algonquin, 304 pp., $16.95.) This “wry, un-ponderous, anti-obligatory” memoir, as our reviewer, Paul Elie, put it, “vividly attests” to Thompson’s journey as a people musician, from his music with Fairport Conference and his first spouse to his conversion to Islam.

GOLD DIGGERS, by Sanjena Sathian. (Penguin, 352 pp., $17.) Set in Atlanta’s suburbs in the course of the mid-2000s, this magical realist story follows an Indian American teenager as he aimlessly navigates adolescence till a golden elixir bonds him to his ancestry. “The stress Sathian builds is one among teenage insecurity swelling into maturity,” our reviewer, Lauren Christensen, commented, “till disillusion overthrows the tyranny of American perfectionism.”

BEE PEOPLE AND THE BUGS THEY LOVE, by Frank Mortimer. (Citadel, 320 pp., $15.95.) A beekeeper recounts his expertise transferring from novice to grasp, offering ample recommendation and presenting the eccentrics, oddballs and, as our reviewer, Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, put it, “flagrantly self-promoting windbags” he encounters alongside the best way.