1. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown)

Woefully overlooked in the mythology of the Founding Fathers, Samuel Adams has been rescued from obscurity in Schiff’s fast-paced narrative, which gallops like Paul Revere’s horse on the “Midnight Ride.” Pulitzer Prize winner Schiff presents Adams as a wily, creative radical with a pen and a moral backbone who knew his way around smoky back rooms. “With singular lucidity Adams plucked ideas from the air and pinned them to the page,” she writes, “layering in moral dimensions, whipping up emotions, seizing and shaping the public imagination.”

2. Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern by Neil Baldwin (Knopf)

“This is the story,” Baldwin writes in his robust, propulsive biography, “of how Martha Graham became Martha Graham.” Baldwin captures the arc of the visionary dancer and choreographer’s life, from chorus girl to founder of the dance company and school that revolutionized modern dance in the burst of midcentury modernism. He interprets Graham’s aesthetic vision and dynamic technique in her theatrical dance pieces, while illustrating both her volatile relationships and her creative imagination.

3. Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser (Bloomsbury)

In her fascinating dual biography of British novelist sisters Jane and Anna Maria Porter, Looser argues that while the Porters were the premier novelists of the Regency period, they have been wrongly overlooked in literary history. Their childhood friend Sir Walter Scott, Looser contends, snagged their ideas and leapfrogged over them to acclaim. Meanwhile, the sisters, churned out novels not only to support themselves but to cover the debts accrued by their spendthrift brother who was a successful painter who married into a Russian family. Looser is quite the literary sleuth, uncovering letters that their struggle for economic security and lousy romantic encounters with men.

4. Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan (New Directions)

Ingeniously defying genre, Scanlan creates a new fictional form of ventriloquy. From interview transcripts, Scanlan tells the story of horse trainer “Sonia” in vignettes, shards with jagged edges, capturing her eccentricities. She channels the “particular language” of the track, from the grooms, trainers, and jockeys on the backstretch to the quotidian details of hooves and tails. Scanlan is a magician of synthesis and compression. This is one chapter, titled “Racetrackers”: “You’re around some really prominent people and some are just as common as old shoes.”

5. Love in the Time of Time’s Up: Short Fiction Edited by Christine Sneed (Tortoise Books)

In her introduction to this collection of smashingly smart stories, Sneed writes that unwanted touches and sexual aggression are a kind of robbery that cannot be overcome by replacing money or a purse. “You have to carry the transgressive memory like a kind of dirty currency,” she continues, “for as long as your brain and body hold onto it.” These stories range dramatically, from Roberta Montgomery’s “The Sacrament of Brett” (Kavanaugh’s confessions) to Elizabeth Crane’s “Dudes, in Theory,” which involves swiping right. These stories share an intensity, a sense of foreboding, and varied forms of struggle for power, such as in May-lee Chai’s “In the Academic Grove” and Sneed’s own story, the dark “Potpourri,” which picks up on the power dynamics of Please Be Advised, her satirical novel in memos that takes on