Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. (Harper Perennial, 816 pp., $20.) This debut novel, one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021, tells the converging stories of a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century and the “songs” of her Native American and enslaved African American ancestors. Reviewer Veronica Chambers wrote that it was “quite simply the best book that I have read in a very, very long time.”

■ “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” by Timothy Snyder. (Basic Books, 592 pp., $22.99.) Originally published in 2012, Snyder’s updated account of the horrific killings in the area between Germany and Russia (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic region and Belarus) by Nazi and Soviet forces includes reflections by the author on the current global situation.

■ “Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark,” by Cecelia Watson. (Ecco, 224 pp., $16.99.) This “biography” chronicles the semicolon’s life from its origins in late-15th-century Venice to its waning use today. Former Times critic Parul Sehgal wrote that Watson covers vast terrain while “skittering back and forth like a sandpiper at the shores of language’s Great Debates.”

■ “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” by Joanne Greenberg. (Penguin Classics, 304 pp., $17.) A reissue of Greenberg’s 1964 novel, in which a 16-year-old suffering from schizophrenia spends three years at a psychiatric hospital, where she attempts to escape an imaginary world. R.V. Cassill, who originally reviewed the book for the Times, called it “a fit culmination of a flight from the Old World to the New.”

■ “The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a UFO: The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill,” by John Fuller. (Vintage, 464 pp., $18.) In this pillar of the alien abduction narrative, originally published in 1966, a New Hampshire couple share the story of their abduction by a UFO while driving on a deserted road one summer night in 1961. It is considered the first modern claim of such an encounter.

■ “Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate,” by Daniel Mendelsohn. (New York Review Books, 128 pp., $15.95.) This book weaves together the story of three exiled writers who turned to the classics and blends memoir, biography, history and criticism to tell a story that, as reviewer Becca Rothfeld wrote, is “so mad with interconnections that it elicits both paranoia and enchantment.”