Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump,” by Tim Alberta. (Harper Paperbacks, 704 pp., $18.99.) More about the Republican Party’s identity crisis than about Trump himself, this well-sourced political analysis by a journalist who has worked at National Review and Politico tells the story of what New York Times critic Jennifer Szalai deemed “the ultimate devil’s bargain”: swapping “compassionate conservatism” for long-craved “goodies” like environmental rollbacks, judicial appointments and tax cuts.

■ “Lot: Stories,” by Bryan Washington. (Riverhead, 240 pp., $16.) For Times reviewer Luis Alberto Urrea, the title of this debut collection of stories exploring “the true meaning of borders” called to mind “empty lots, our lots in life, even the biblical figure Lot.”

■ “Mrs. Everything,” by Jennifer Weiner. (Washington Square Press, 496 pp., $17.) Balancing Weiner’s “signature sense of humor with a new (to her novels) political voice,” this feminist yarn whose heroine was inspired by Jo March of “Little Women” put Times reviewer Elisabeth Egan “into the kind of anti-social trance my teenagers hope for.”

■ “The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father,” by Janny Scott. (Riverhead, 288 pp., $17.) A Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter finds clues to the burdens of inheritance when she unearths the long-hidden diaries of her father, scion of their wealthy Philadelphia Main Line family. Scott’s prose, Times reviewer Michael Gorra noted, evokes both Henry James, with “sentences stretched out for leisure,” and “an anthropologist, defining the odd folkways of her tribe.”

■ “Notes From a Young Black Chef: A Memoir,” by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein. (Vintage, 288 pp., $16.95.) This “fierce and inspiring” book by the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of 2019 is at once a “rip-roaring tale of ambition” and a “sobering account of racism in and out of the food industry,” Times reviewer Dawn Drzal wrote.

■ “The Gone Dead,” by Chanelle Benz. (Ecco, 304 pp., $16.99.) Almost every chapter of this first novel about the legacy of American slavery “yields a surprise,” Margaret Wilkerson Sexton wrote in the Times. When Billie returns to the former Mississippi Delta home of her renowned black poet father 30 years after his unexpected death when she was 4, she is confronted with memories of her past and fears of ongoing white supremacy in her future.