Also of interest...in creative sparks

Burn Book by Kara Swisher (Simon & Schuster, $30)

Kara Swisher “clearly relishes jousting with arrogant males,” said Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. The 61-yearold tech journalist has made a career of it, having settled in Silicon Valley just as the first tech moguls were being minted. To this day, she “wants to be the toughest of the insiders,” and watching her play the role is one appeal of her new memoir. “The uneasy symbiosis between writer and subject is a thread that runs through Burn Book, elevating it above a gossipy romp (which it also is).”

3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan (Penguin, $35)

“In a sense, 3 Shades of Blue is an ode to a time when people cared enough to get angry about jazz,” said Chris Vognar in the Los Angeles Times.

A triple biography of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans, James Kaplan’s “compulsively readable” book traces their paths to March 1959, when they came together to record Kind of Blue, the most revered jazz album ever. “A master shaper of narrative,” Kaplan ably captures how and why jazz became such a powerful cultural force.

The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano (PublicAffairs, $35)

Tricia Romano’s new oral history of the Village Voice “may be the best history of a journalistic enterprise

I’ve ever read,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. “Big, discursive, ardent, intellectual, and flecked with gossip,” it revisits the Voice’s long, lively reign as America’s most important alternative weekly, and does so with barely a hint of nostalgia. Argumentation was part of the paper’s DNA, and the spirit lives on. “The tone is a symphonic kind of anarchy.”

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron, $29)

“When one star rises, another falters,” said Carole V. Bell in NPR.org. That dynamic is “terrifically drawn” in Xochitl Gonzalez’s new novel, which fictionalizes the true story of a young Cuban-American artist whose artist husband was suspected when she fell to her death in 1985. “It’s impressive how well Gonzalez gets into both of their heads,” and how she deepens her themes by introducing an art history student who re-examines the incident. The result is “a brilliantly entertaining triumph.”