For plenty of folks, the first Tuesday after Memorial Day marks the first “true” day of summer: Sun! Sand! Baseball! Indigestion! Sunburn! Heatstroke? Reckless whales?!

OK, you’re right, what were we thinking — it’s way too dangerous out there. Much safer to stay indoors, close the blinds and wait for winter and a good book. Good thing this week’s publishing highlights, all fiction, present plenty of opportunities for escape. Why not get away to London or Malaysia, or go spelunking in the mind of a sociopath, all from the thermostat-managed comfort of your own home?

Beware of papercuts, though — that could easily turn into a Stephen King-esque nightmare scenario if you’re not ready.

Autocorrect: Stories, by Etgar Keret, translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston

Keret, a doyen of the short story, typically takes his task quite literally: Whatever else it may be, a story by the Israeli writer is quite likely to be short. That’s true as well in Autocorrect, the latest of the Israeli writer’s collections to be translated into English. Most of the stories here last no more than a handful of pages. But don’t mistake his characteristic concision and humor for flippancy. Some of these stories — originally published in Hebrew, in the long shadow of the Oct. 7 attacks and the war in Gaza — hit like a punch to the gut from a passing stranger.

Consider Yourself Kissed, by Jessica Stanley

In at least one sense, Stanley didn’t have to go far to generate drama for her second novel: Its backdrop is the truly tumultuous past decade in British politics, which the Australian expat experienced herself living in London. But noisy as they may be, Brexit, Covid and the revolving door of prime ministers just add flavor to this book’s entree: a romance between a political journalist and an aspiring novelist who struggles to balance their “happily ever after” — complete with cute kids, et al — with the independent sense of self that all this familial contentment threatens to drown.

Never Flinch, by Stephen King

Holly Gibney is back — though it’s not as if she really left for long. Lately the eccentric private detective has rounded into a marquee player in King’s troupe of recurring characters. She has appeared in seven of King’s books in the decade or so since her introduction in Mr. Mercedes, and finally got her own book, titled Holly, in 2023. In this two-pronged thriller, Gibney gets called upon both to protect a women’s rights activist and prevent a mysterious killer from following through on an audacious threat.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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The South, by Tash Aw

Back in 2010, famed librarian Nancy Pearl slipped a rather audacious declaration into an otherwise innocuous article: “I believe that someday Aw will win a well-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature.” Now, that prediction hasn’t come true yet, but the 50-something Malaysian novelist still has time — and a growing bibliography that has only attracted more passionate fans since then. Now based in the U.K., Aw in his latest novel returns to Malaysia for the story of a family seeking to revive an inherited farm, with the son center-stage, coming of age and into young queer love.

The Stalker, by Paula Bomer

Doughty, the star of Bomer’s latest novel, courts comparisons to Patrick Bateman and Tom Ripley. Manipulative, unbridled by morals, as deceptive with others as they are with themselves — only, it appears that Doughty is also unbridled by brains. The saga of this dim and dastardly striver is streaked through with pitch-black humor.

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Published May 27, 2025 7:02 AM PDT

Marcel Ophuls believed subjectivity was key to filmmaking and saw documentaries as an antidote to the news. He’s pictured above on May 5, 1987.

Chip Hires/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

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Chip Hires/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Marcel Ophuls believed subjectivity was key to filmmaking and saw documentaries as an antidote to the news. He’s pictured above on May 5, 1987.

Chip Hires/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Filmmaker Marcel Ophuls has died at the age of 97. Recognized as one of the great documentarians of his era, he died on Saturday, as confirmed by his grandson, Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert.

Ophuls demanded — and commanded — his audience’s attention, in 4 plus hour documentaries like The Sorrow and The Pity and Hôtel Terminus.

Ophuls knew that by creating hours-long documentaries, he ran the danger of “not only seeming pretentious, but being pretentious.” But, as he told NPR in 1978, “there’s a relationship between attention span and morality. I think that, if you shorten people’s attention span a great deal, you are left with only the attraction of power.”

Ophuls was born in Germany and his family fled to France to escape the Nazis. They eventually ended up in Hollywood, where his father, the famed director Max Ophuls, found work. His son started out making fiction films, too, but went on to become one of the foremost chroniclers of the atrocities of the 20th century.

The Sorrow and The Pity is Ophuls’ 1969 epic about the Nazi occupation of France. He interviewed former Nazis, French officials who collaborated, members of the Resistance, and average people who simply found ways to get by. Throughout the film, Ophuls appears on camera—patiently drawing confessions from his subjects. The film faced criticism in France for its depiction of the country’s war efforts.

The Sorrow and The Pity became an art house hit, says Patricia Aufderheide, who teaches communications at American University in Washington, D.C. — and it helped create a new kind of documentary.

“It’s a kind of filmmaking where the filmmaker is very present as an investigator into something about the human condition,” she says.

Ophuls told NPR in 1992 that documentaries function as an antidote to news. Subjectivity is key, he said; the goal is “to juxtapose events and people in such a way that individual destinies and collective destinies make us think and reflect about our own roles in life.”

Ophuls was good at putting old Nazis and retired U.S. intelligence workers at their ease, as he does in his 1988 film Hôtel Terminus, about Klaus Barbie — a notorious Nazi — and the Americans who later protected him. When the film crew arrived to set up for interviews, Ophuls stayed in the back of the room, letting the crew chat up the subject.

Judy Karp, the filmmaker’s U.S. sound recordist, says Ophuls would adapt to make the interviewee comfortable. “He would come in as the person that he needed to be in order to get the story out of them and to get the information that he wanted,” Karp says. “He was never false — but it’s like we never knew which Marcel was going to be there.”

For Hôtel Terminus, which won the best documentary feature Oscar in 1988, Ophuls interviewed French writer and philosopher René Tavernier, who lived through the period the film covers. His son, acclaimed director Bertrand Tavernier, described Ophuls as one of the greatest of all filmmakers, not just documentarians.

“He knew that documentary sometimes has to be built as a fiction film,” Tavernier told NPR in an interview before his own passing in 2021. “You have to have interesting characters. You have to have an interesting angle. You have to work on dramatization, progression. At the same time, he was never manipulating the audience.”

His stories were true, but Ophuls thought of himself as an entertainer nonetheless. In 1978, he told NPR that his greatest hero in show business — and yes, he considered himself in show business — was Fred Astaire. The dancer’s “control and structure and balance is so dignified, and so rarified,” he said.

In 1992, he told NPR that his mission was to make the world a better place through his work, going beyond entertainment. “That’s what we live for, isn’t it?” he said. “To try to make it better.”