Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “Users,” by Colin Winnette. (Soft Skull Press, 288 pages, $16.95.) “We all kept horrible parts of ourselves alive in the dark,” notes Miles, the narrator of this acute novel, a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. As a “lead creative” at a virtual reality company that turns people’s dreams and pasts into paid daytime fantasies, which is newly mired in scandal, Miles is increasingly beholden to those shadowy parts — of his users, and of himself.

■ “Stash: My Life in Hiding,” by Laura Cathcart Robbins. (Atria, 304 pages, $18.99.) A Hollywood mom and publicist who felt deeply weighed down by “the burden of representing Black excellence” details her struggles with postpartum depression, addiction and recovery in what a Times reviewer called “an emotionally absorbing and swiftly paced multisensory experience.”

■“A Chance Meeting: American Encounters,” by Rachel Cohen. (NYRB Classics, 416 pages, $19.95.) Cohen connects famous Americans in this 2004 essay collection, from W.E.B. Du Bois visiting Helen Keller in Boston to James Baldwin meeting Norman Mailer at a Paris party. Each encounter is “bound up both with the place where one is standing and with the motion one is in,” Cohen writes in the afterword to this new edition.

■“Ozark Dogs,” by Eli Cranor. (Soho Crime, 336 pages, $17.95.) This thriller, which Times columnist Sarah Weinman picked as one of the best crime novels of 2023, takes place in rural Arkansas, where the feud between the Fitzjurl and Ledford families, connected by a murder years ago, threatens to tear their town apart. “Cranor doesn’t hide the horror or the emotional wreckage,” Weinman wrote.