1. American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise by Eduardo Porter (Knopf)

In his sophisticated new book, Porter demonstrates that the toxic combination of racism and the absence of a true safety net hurts both people of color and lower-income white people. Porter, who covers economics for the New York Times, condemns the “lack of empathy” in society and argues that these divisions undermine American life. Porter grounds his sobering and bracing investigation in reporting around the country, and beyond anecdotal evidence, he employs important economic research to show how structural inequity has been reinforced by factors ranging from judicial selections to unemployment, underfunded public schools, addiction, poverty, massive incarceration, lack of health care, and large-scale segregation.

2. Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy by David Daley (Liveright)

In his 2016 book Ratf**ked, Daley registered how GOP gerrymandering solidified Republican control of the U.S. House. “Maddened” by the political despair around him, he joined what he describes as the “quiet revolutionaries” fighting back at the grassroots level. In his robust and fulfilling Unrigged, Daley reports from the front lines on Native Americans challenging voter ID laws, Idahoans working for Medicaid expansion, and former felons trying to restore their voting rights in Louisiana. Along the way, he finds millennials training to run for office and a range of original local reforms that are evidence of innovative opposition.

3. Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight over a Modernist Masterpiece by Alex Beam (Random House)

The “architectural treasure” of steel and glass designed by Mies van der Rohe was to be the weekend home of an affluent Chicago kidney specialist who was also a classically trained violinist, published poet, and translator of Italian verse, but this pet project came to embody the individual frustrations and rages of client and architect. Their intense entanglement began at a 1945 dinner party and continued over picnics and late nights in Mies’ office as they collaborated on house plans, but as Beam vividly recounts in his fascinating book, it devolved quickly into lawsuits as Mies’ creation became an unlivable, flood-prone, vastly expensive hothouse. “My house is a monument to Mies van der Rohe,” Farnsworth reportedly said later, “and I’m paying for it.”

4. Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone by Madison Smartt Bell (Doubleday)

With psychological insight, a nuanced sense of history and a smart literary sensibility, Bell’s biography of Robert Stone (1937–2015) makes a compelling case that the writer best known for his National Book Award-winning 1974 Vietnam novel Dog Soldiers was one of the great fiction writers of the American postwar era. Bell pulls from his deep knowledge of Stone’s fiction and archives to grasp how Stone’s childhood exposure to Catholicism, his restlessness, and his curiosity made him an autodidact, drawing from experiences in places from Havana, New Orleans, and Key West to New York and Jerusalem. “A Robert Stone novel,” Bell writes, “is an artistically closed system in which the social issues of a given period play out in an experimental form.”

5. Writers & Lovers by Lily King (Grove)

A former golf prodigy, now working as a waitress, really wants to write a novel in her tiny garage apartment. But who can write when caught in a love triangle with two very different men and preoccupied by their mother’s recent death? Already a bestseller, the prodigiously talented King’s Writers & Lovers captures intensely conflicting feelings about success and failure, fear of rejection and the passion to live a creative life when your friends seem to have forsaken the dream you once shared.