Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “Small Mercies,” by Dennis Lehane. (Harper Perennial, 320 pages, $19.99.) Lehane’s latest mystery is set in the summer of 1974, when a busing backlash is roiling Boston. It “has all the hallmarks of Lehane at his best: a propulsive plot, a perfectly drawn cast of working-class Boston Irish characters, razor-sharp wit and a pervasive darkness through which occasional glimmers of hope peek out,” a Times reviewer wrote.

■ “Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley,” by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans. (Holt, 400 pages, $19.99.) This biography traces the life of Tony Hsieh, the millionaire founder of the shoe retailer Zappos, “with the gathering tension of a slow-motion disaster,” said a New York Times reviewer — from selling his first company to Microsoft to his struggles with isolation and addiction and his death in 2020 at age 46.

■ “The Last Animal,” by Ramona Ausubel. (Riverhead, 304 pages, $18.) An absurdist romp about family and climate change, which follows two teenagers as they contend with their father’s death and their paleobiologist mom’s desire to birth a woolly mammoth in a lab.

■ “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” by Claire Dederer. (Vintage, 288 pages, $17.) Dederer’s book expands on her viral 2017 essay, “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” It plumbs the relationship between art, gender and morality in the work and lives of famous artists. It is “part memoir, part treatise and all treat,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote in her review.

■ “The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War,” by Chad L. Williams. (Picador, 560 pages, $21.) Du Bois hoped that by fighting “against militarism and for democracy, we would be fighting for the emancipation of the Negro race,” Williams recounts in his history of Du Bois’ changing views on World War I, including his trips to interview Black troops and his 20 years spent writing an unfinished history of the war.