Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ ‘The Book of Eating: Adventures in Professional Gluttony,’ by Adam Platt.

(Ecco, 272 pp., $17.99.) Gout, expandable belts, diets, countless bottles of antacid tablets: Platt, the longtime food critic for New York magazine, dishes up a painfully honest account of what it’s like to eat for a living. “He’s maniacally self-deprecating,” Dwight Garner wrote in The Times last year. “He serves good stories because he doesn’t over-batter them.”

■ ‘Busted in New York: And Other Essays,’ by Darryl Pinckney. (Picador, 416 pp., $19.) In the depth and breadth of these pieces, which range from the Million Man March to the gentrification of Harlem to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, Pinckney “reveals himself to be a skillful chronicler of Black experience in literary criticism, reportage and biography,” Times reviewer Lauretta Charlton wrote.

■ ‘Little Darlings,’ by Melanie Golding. (Crooked Lane Books, 328 pp., $16.99.)

Times horror columnist Danielle Trussoni loved this debut novel about a woman’s descent into paranoia after delivering twins: “Golding’s portrait of new motherhood was so spot on, so filled with the horrible and gruesome realities of childbirth, and the infantilization of women by the medical system, that I couldn’t turn away.”

■ ‘In the Dream House: A Memoir,’ by Carmen Maria Machado. (Graywolf, 272 pp., $16.) Each chapter of this gutting memoir — which explores Machado’s abusive relationship with another woman while in graduate school — “hews to the conventions of a different genre: road trip, romance novel, creature feature, lesbian pulp novel, stoner comedy,” Parul Sehgal explained in her Times review. “It is a book in shards.”

■ ‘A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father,’ by David Maraniss. (Simon & Schuster, 432 pp., $17.) Seventy years after the House Un-American Activities Committee accused his father of being a member of the Communist Party, Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, “used his prodigious research skills to produce a story that leaves one aching with its poignancy, its finely wrought sense of what was lost, both in his home and in our nation,” Kevin Baker wrote in The Times.

■ ‘Olive, Again,’ by Elizabeth Strout. (Random House, 320 pp., $18.) Olive Kitteridge, the tart, irritable retired math teacher who groused her way through Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 novel, “fully deserves the sensitive and satisfying follow-up that Strout has written about her,” Times reviewer John McMurtrie opined last year.