1. The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander (Grand Central)

In a searing essay published by The New Yorker on the killing of George Floyd, Alexander wrote, “I call the young people who grew up in the as twenty-five years the Trayvon Generation” That essay  about the “agglomerating spectacle” of violence informs the core of this remarkable book by the poet, scholar, and radical force for good, the genius creator of “Praise Song for the Day” which she recited at President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Melding stunning artwork from Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel, and Elizabeth Catlett with the fierce and fine poetry of Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and John Coltrane. Prose poet Alexander, whose memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award now presents a genre-defying book that is itself a work of great art. “Artists make radical solutions all day long,” she writes, “soup from a stone, beauty from thin air.”

2. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (Scribner)

Zoom to the future on Egan’s magic carpet, woven from her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad. Engrossing, original, and empathic, Egan’s new novel brilliantly reimagines a world shaped – or warped – by internet and social media algorithms and stealth marketing. The Candy House shares Goon Squad’s DNA, though it’s less a sibling than an offspring; the stylish inventiveness of a chapter in PowerPoint is now updated with texts and email threads. Vibrant characters like inflammatory publicist Dolly and kleptomaniac Sasha have been reimagined in this “Self-Surveillance Era” in which individual consciousness can be uploaded into an online collective” and a “weevil” can be implanted in the brain. “Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house,” says aging music producer of the “Flaming Dildos” Bennie Salazar, “through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.”

3. Fire and Flood: by Eugene Linden (Penguin Press)

Veteran nature and environmental reporter Linden first wrote about climate change nearly three decades ago for Time magazine, and his bracing, illuminating new book focuses on the history of carbon emissions, especially lost opportunities to make change. He takes aim at the weak Kyoto Protocol, which was enacted in 1977 yet not ratified until 2005, costing critical years in the battle to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Linden lucidly guides readers decade by decade, facing a set of themes: the reality of climate change, lagging public opinion and political will and business and financial interests. In particular, he spotlights the insurance industry which foresees danger and is identifying fire and flood zones, especially Florida and California, and engaging in “climate redlining.”

4. Riverman: An American Odyssey by Ben McGrath (Knopf)

In the story of a river wanderer who seemed to have wandered off, New Yorker writer McGrath has landed in the world of Dick Conant, who vanished near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. McGrath exquisitely recovers the life of the affable transcontinental canoeist who had intrigued him when they once met on the Hudson River. Once an artist and hospital worker, the eccentric and smart Conant left behind about 2,000 pages of text and a bundle of photographs. With those artifacts, McGrath does more than chronicle Conant’s life through the folkways and lives of those in the river towns he visited; he evokes a magical, almost wistful, dimension to this genial, manatee-shaped character in overalls, a “Studs Terkel of the riverbank.”

5. Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press)

 Jones has a gift for seeing life on the margins. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her portrait of Ramsey Orta, who recorded the NYPD killing of Eric Garner and then was harassed for it, she now turns the lens on herself. Jones endures the pain of a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis, or, as she puts it is, “born without a sacrum, the bone that connects the spine to the pelvis.” Jones has a capacious mind, segueing between Kant and Iris Murdoch on the philosophies of beauty to her unanticipated motherhood, determination to travel, and her coping strategy of retreating to “the neutral room in her mind,” challenged by the arrival of her child.