Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “Moon Witch, Spider

King,” by Marlon James. (Riverhead, 672 pages, $18.) This second installment of the “Dark Star” trilogy tells the life story of Sogolon, a mistreated and thorny force who is relentlessly abused and haunted by ghosts on her way to becoming the main antagonist of “Black Leopard, Red Wolf.” James conjures up vampires, swamp trolls and dragons in settings that, as reviewer Eowyn Ivey wrote, “rival any creation of Italo Calvino.”

■ “Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance,” by Mia Bay. (Belknap/ Harvard University, 400 pages, $19.95.) This impressive history of mobility and resistance in America uses literal movement as a way to better understand the civil rights movement, elegantly illustrating the stark stakes and haphazard risks that many Black Americans accepted while traveling in the Jim Crow South.

■ “Vladimir,” by Julia May Jonas. (Avid Reader, 272 pages, $17.99.) This debut follows a middle-aged literature professor, her promiscuous husband, a newly arrived experimental novelist and his memoirist wife as the foursome flirt, cajole, deceive and liberate one another at a college in upstate New York. Reviewer Jean Hanff Korelitz called the novel “a witty dance with the ghost of Nabokov” and a razor-edged commentary on academia.

■ “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us,” by Danielle J. Lindemann. (Picador, 352 pages, $20.) Lindemann’s study of reality television describes how the medium, from top chefs to the Kardashians, nudges viewers into a phantom codependency: “The experience of watching these shows, like looking in any mirror, is interactive. We see ourselves, and then we groom ourselves accordingly.”

■ “The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth,” by Kristin Henning. (Vintage, 512 pages, $19.) Drawing on 25 years of experience as a defense attorney in juvenile courts, Henning presents exhaustive research into juvenile justice, stories about her clients and reflections on high-profile cases, including those of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. Reviewer David Lat called her account “comprehensive and convincing.”