Paperbacks new and noteworthy

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review: At the Existentialist CafÉ: Freedom, Being, and Apricot

Cocktails, by Sarah Bakewell. (Other Press, $17.95.) Bakewell’s history, one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2016, serves as a collective biography of a halfdozen pre-eminent existentialist philosophers, including Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Her lucid account has a particular focus on the political and moral crises of the 1930s and ‘40s that shaped her subjects’ work.

Little Nothing, by Marisa Silver. (Blue Rider Press, $16.) In this grown-up fairy tale, Pavla is born a dwarf, but over time shifts into a wolf girl; the man who built a torturous device to stretch her to a normal size loves her from afar in all her dysmorphic forms. As New York Times reviewer Matt Bell put it, the novel “traces how memories and the stories we tell shape who we are and what we are capable of becoming.” Who Killed These Girls? The Unsolved Murders That

Rocked a Texas Town ,by Beverly Lowry. (Vintage, $8.99.) In December 1991, the bodies of four teenagers were found in the Austin, Texas, frozen-yogurt store where they worked — naked, bound, gagged and burned. Nearly 20 years later, Lowry becomes interested in the crime and recounts with a novelist’s pace all the facts and unresolved questions of the case. A Thousand Miles From Nowhere, by John Gregory Brown. (Lee Boudreaux/Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Henry Garrett — divorced, out of a job and out of money — left New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached, finding unexpected solace in a small Virginia town. After he becomes involved in the accidental death of a black inmate, he is stranded at the hotel where he has been staying; an unlikely friendship forged there empowers him to return home and atone for his previous misdeeds. Play All: A Bingewatcher’s

Notebook, by Clive James. (Yale, $13.) While fighting leukemia, James — a critic, scholar and former television critic — takes to watching, with his daughter as a companion. The resulting collection of essays, centered on notable series from “The Sopranos” to “Breaking Bad,” brims with affection: for the arts, for criticism and for life itself.

The Mortifications, by Derek Palacio. (Tim Duggan, $16.) A novel detailing a Cuban family’s exodus draws on ancient Greek themes. In praising Palacio’s “extraordinary” writing, Times reviewer Dinaw Mengestu wrote: “This restlessness of Palacio’s approach — roaming across physical and cultural borders, borrowing and revising as he sees fit — allows him to tread on territory most American writers are reluctant to touch.”