LIT PICKS

We recommend these recently reviewed titles: The Nixon Tapes Edited and annotated by Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 758 pages; $35) Brinkley and Nichter have compiled a huge, fascinating and devastatingly accurate portrait of the 37th president. Factory Man How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Helped Save an American Town By Beth Macy (Little, Brown; 451 pages; $28) Macy’s remarkable work probes every corner of its topic and values every subject who has something to say. Last Stories and Other Stories By William T. Vollmann (Viking; 677 pages; $36) Reading these ghost stories, you experience a simultaneous ghoulish horror and the odd Dickensian merriment. All the Rage Stories By A.L. Kennedy (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 215 pages; $24) Few writers can make our foibles so entertaining. Everything I Never Told You By Celeste Ng (The Penguin Press; 297 pages; $26.95) Ng’s novel is a subtle meditation on gender, race and the weight of one generation’s unfulfilled ambitions upon the shoulders of the next. All Our Yesterdays By Erik Tarloff (CL Publishing; 374 pages; $20 paperback) Tarloff’s insightful novel about Berkeley in the ’60s avoids the twin sins of romanticism and noir despair.