Vivian Gornick's memoir, Fierce Attachments.

Walter Tevis's novel The Queen's Gambit.

Lawrence Weschler's profile of an artist (or con artist), Boggs: A Comedy of Values.

J.M. Ledgard's novel Submergence.

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, edited by Leonard Marcus

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness by John M. Hull

Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones

Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

Heinrich von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas (in the collection The Marquise of O— and Other Stories)

Jo Ann Beard's collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth

Simone Schwarz-Bart's novel, The Bridge of Beyond

Mary McCarthy's memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Geoffrey Household's thriller, Rogue Male

Frederick and Steven Barthelme's memoir of gambling, writing, and family, Double Down

Janet Lewis's historical novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre

Marshall Frady's political profile, Wallace

Helen DeWitt's novel, The Last Samurai

John McPhee's account of the 1968 U.S. Open tennis final, Levels of the Game

James Weldon Johnson's novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Charlotte Gill's memoir of tree-planting in British Columbia, Eating Dirt

Ben Katchor's collection of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer comic strips, Cheap Novelties

W. Stanley Moss's memoir of the kidnapping of a Nazi general in World War II, Ill Met by Moonlight

Elizabeth Harrower's novel, The Watch Tower