Paperbacks new and noteworthy

“The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession With a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate,” by Martin Puchner. (Norton, 288 pp., $17.95.) This “deeply personal project” probes “the meaning of language and family, inheritance and debt,” as Times reviewer Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim put it. The title refers to Rotwelsch, a mix of Yiddish, Hebrew and repurposed German that antiSemites cited to link Jews and crime (though most of its itinerant speakers were not Jewish and their “secret code” was not about crime).

“The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata,”

by Gina Apostol. (Soho Press, 360 pp., $17.) Like “Infinite Jest” and “Pale Fire,” Apostol’s second novel, which was first published in the Philippines in 2009 and won the country’s National Book Award, “adopts absurd premises that are treated with graven seriousness by wordplay-obsessed narrators,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review, adding that its “deranged scholarly contours” are both “confidently obscure” and “very, very funny.”

“Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix,”

by Philip Norman. (Liveright, 416 pp., $18.95.) “Skillfully narrated” by Norman (also the author of the Beatles book “Shout!”) the guitar legend’s life story “becomes even more astounding, thanks to an abundance of rich details,” according to reviewer Lauretta Charlton.

“The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams,”

by David S. Brown. (Scribner, 464 pp., $20.) This “marvelous” biography, in reviewer Amy S. Greenberg’s words, “reveals how dynastic burden shaped the personality and career of the brilliant, bitter and thoroughly unlikable man who brought the prominence of the Adams family, and expectations for the endurance of political legacies, to an ignominious end.”