1. August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan (Simon & Schuster)

Playwright Wilson (1945-2005) was a giant in American letters, and Hartigan, a theater and arts reporter with a long career at the Boston Globe, richly recounts his accomplished, and complicated, life and career. The foremost chronicler of 20th-century Black experiences for the stage, Wilson won Pulitzer Prizes for Fences and The Piano Lesson, two parts of his 10-play Century Cycle. In her biography, Hartigan traces Wilson’s life from his origins in Pittsburgh and his struggles to reach regional theater to rave reviews on Broadway. Hartigan provides a comprehensive look at Wilson’s career and also takes account of his serial womanizing and the toll that took on his marriages.

2. The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life by M. T. Connolly (PublicAffairs)

“What makes aging so much harder than it should be?” That question animates Connolly’s surprisingly pleasurable book about growing old. Connolly, founding head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative, and honored with a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, is a wonderfully engaging storyteller on a subject that people avoid. She has a wide-angled view, taking aim at the ageism in American society that shortens lives and costs billions, and the fragmented – and often cruel – systems involving not only health care and insurance but also the failure to build an infrastructure for aging well. With warmth and clarity, Connolly captures how the celebrated American virtue of self-sufficiency snares individuals into isolation and loneliness when the evidence is that it’s “interdependence that leads to better health and well-being.”

3. Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping by Shane McCrae (Scribner)

In his engrossing memoir, McCrae, a gifted poet teaching at Columbia University, a Guggenheim fellow, and winner of both Whiting and Anisfield-Wolff awards, does not merely recount the traumatic events of his childhood. He has written a gorgeous prose poem about the conditionality of memory. He was just 3 years old when his white supremacist maternal grandparents took him from his Black father, cruelly constructing a narrative to erase his father and his history, and making him complicit. “Most of a kidnapping, almost all of it,” McCrae writes, “happens after the child is taken.”

4. Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III (W. W. Norton)

In his engrossing and emotionally rewarding novel, Dubus channels protagonist Tom Lowe, who has spiraled downward in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Addicted to painkillers after a roofing accident, he loses everything – his livelihood, his house, his wife and son, his car; even his tools are stolen. Forced into a government-subsidized housing project, Tom incrementally revises himself by thinking about others.  Dubus writes empathically, and when speaking about the novel, notes the wisdom of poet Rumi: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

5. The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever by Prudence Peiffer (Harper)

“Place is an undervalued determinant in creative output,” writes Peiffer in her fascinating portrait of the eclectic artists who converged at the lower tip of Manhattan living, working, and thriving in cheap studios and lofts on tiny Coenties Slip from 1956 to 1967. A disparate group, ranging from painters Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman to fiber artist Lenore Tawney, forged a connection to this somewhat isolated, dilapidated pocket of the city that geographically allowed for “collective solitude,” Peiffer writes, and “they could retreat into the solitary work and discipline of art making.”