1. The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright)

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Les Payne died in 2018 after spending nearly three decades working on his ambitious, revelatory biography tracing the dramatic life arc of the former Malcolm Little, from babyhood in Omaha, Nebraska, to the international stage as the Nation of Islam’s proselytizer and demander of justice, to his assassination in 1965. Payne’s daughter Tamara, who had been working with her father as a researcher, brought this magisterial biography to completion. A finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction, Payne’s book captures the nuances of Malcolm X’s evolution and presents compelling portraits of characters such as Marcus Garvey, Betty Shabazz, and Martin Luther King Jr.

2. Fauci by Michael Specter, read by the author (Pushkin audiobook)

Specter, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has known Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health for decades, since long before Fauci became the trusted, truth-talking doctor ridiculed and threatened by Donald Trump. Specter’s reading, which conveys his affection and respect for “Tony” Fauci and deftly splices in archival footage and recent telephone conversations, enriches the listening experience, especially as he illuminates the evolution of Fauci’s open mind in the AIDS crisis and his relationship with the late activist Larry Kramer.

3. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark (Knopf)

This revelatory biography of Plath reclaims the poet’s life and work as more than a “cultural shorthand for female hysteria,” and, with access to Plath’s surviving letters and her rich insights, Clark breaks through the mythology and pathology of Plath as a “high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death.” In a world that derided female ambition, she argues, Plath became a paradoxical symbol of both female power and helplessness and overlooks her genius. The Bell Jar, Clark writes, is “as much a work of social protest as it is the chronicle of a breakdown.” 

4. Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster)

In recounting the transformation of Archibald Leach, a working-class boy from Bristol, England, into debonair gentleman Cary Grant of His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story, prolific film historian Eyman captures the trajectory of a vaudeville performer and acrobat who heads to Broadway and then Hollywood. Eyman emphasizes that Grant’s charm masked his deep insecurities, contends with questions of his bisexuality, and details his five marriages, especially the one to Dyan Cannon, with whom he had a child he loved dearly. Eyman also tells a story of Hollywood’s Golden Age, with juicy and entertaining glimpses of the backlot, box office details, and how actors honed their skills and made their reputations over time — including Grant, with his distinctive talent for playing the fool unable to recognize the advantage of his good looks.

5. The Best American Short Stories 2020 (The Best American Series) edited by Curtis Sittenfeld with Heidi Pitlor (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Some eagerly anticipate Halloween, but others of us look forward to the fall for the arrival of a literary treat: the collection known as BASS. In this time of COVID-19-reduced attention spans, the best short stories can provide a propulsive bounce into another world and, Pitlor writes in her foreword, “offer up irresistible and universal questions that have no ready answers.” Beginning in her introductory essay, in her distinctively generous but discerning style, Sittenfeld writes, “I LOVED reading these stories” and delineates one reason for each. Regular magazine readers may have seen Mary Gaitskill’s “This Is Pleasure” in the New Yorker, or Emma Cline (“The Nanny”) in the Paris Review, but Sittenfeld also selected wonderful stories from writers and journals that deserve a wider audience, such as Alejandro Puyana and American Short Fiction, Jane Pek and Witness, and Marian Crotty and Crazyhorse.