1. The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Widely known for his poems like “The Raven” and stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe is seen as the master of macabre and a central figure in American Romanticism, but Tresch’s fascinating biography makes a compelling case for reassessing Poe through a scientific lens. Tresch, a professor of History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute, London, considers Poe’s education at West Point, where his studies in geometry, astronomy, and mathematics shaped him as an intellectual. Tresch deftly shows how these interests influenced Poe aesthetically and spurred American interest in scientific mystery and discovery.

2. What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl by Katherine Dykstra (W. W. Norton)

In a perceptive and engrossing investigation, journalist Dykstra examines the disappearance of 18-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who borrowed her roommate’s car one night in 1970 and whose body was found months later in a ditch. Though Dykstra fails to solve the crime, she brings a sharp, distinctive eye to the cold case, and shows that Oberbroeckling was typical of the women of her time rather than a “bad girl,” as is so often whispered about young women in trouble. Dykstra compellingly argues that sexism informed the investigation into Oberbroeckling’s case and that charges of risky behavior undermine the search for evidence.

3. Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, introduction by Margot Livesey (Ecco)

This powerful work of fiction is told in letters between two German friends and business partners from 1932 to 1934, and as Livesey writes in her introduction, it is as timely and prophetic as Kafka’s The Trial or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Published first in Story magazine in 1938, Address Unknown features gentile Martin writing enthusiastically from Germany about the Third Reich while Jewish Max, in the U.S., gradually realizes what is really going on. In his Afterword, Taylor’s son quotes the 1939 The New York Times praise of Address Unknown: “This modern story is perfection itself. It is the most effective indictment of Nazism to appear in fiction.”

4. Leaving Breezy Street: A Memoir by Brenda Myers-Powell, with April Reynolds (Henry Holt)

“I was a child in an adult world,” remembers Myers-Powell, a little girl sexually abused by her uncle, and addicted to crack by age 14. With two babies, she worked as a prostitute. She fled for California and returned to the Midwest as a “messed-up crackhead” who had been stabbed, shot, raped, and imprisoned. Sparing no details of life on the street, Myers-Powell inspires readers to root for her as she climbs back to control her own life and become a forceful advocate for fellow survivors, co-founding the Dreamcatcher Foundation to fight against sex trafficking and exploitation.

5. A Pandemic in Residence: Essays from a Detroit Hospital by Selina Mahmood (Belt Publishing)

In the first year of Mahmood’s neurology residency at a Detroit hospital, COVID-19 hit. In her impressionistic and intimate account, Mahmood captures the chaos and fear of the early days of the pandemic, and then the long months of misery and grief around her. The daughter of Pakistani immigrant physicians, Mahmood moved into a hotel to isolate herself and keep them safe. She chronicles her struggle to become a doctor, deals with microaggressions, works hard to communicate with patients through her mask, is frustrated by the health care system, and contends with her own profound loneliness.