Also of interest...in big authors, short stories

Table for Two by Amor Towles (Viking, $32)

Amor Towles’ new story collection “may be his best book yet,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. The author of A Gentleman in Moscow, “one of our most beloved contemporary novelists,” proves here that his shorter work can equal the deep delights of his novels. The book gathers six stories set in Manhattan and a “noir-ish” novella set in 1930s Hollywood, and “each tale is as satisfying as a master chef’s main course, filled with drama, wit, erudition and, most of all, heart.” Choice by Neel Mukherjee (Norton, $29)

“Neel Mukherjee is brilliant at tracing the ways a choice deferred becomes a fate sealed,” said Jonathan Lee in The New York Times. That’s the unifying principle of the Booker Prize finalist’s “strangely uplifting, exquisitely droll” novel told in interconnected stories. The first follows a control freak who struggles to balance child-rearing with social consciousness; the second, a woman who debates reporting a cab driver’s hit-and-run. In the third, a poor Bengali family is gifted an unexpectedly burdensome cow.

A View From the Stars by Cixin Liu (Tor, $28)

“Cixin Liu may not be a household name in America yet,” said Liz Braswell in The Wall Street Journal. But the Chinese author of The ThreeBody Problem, a 2008 novel that has been adapted into a Netflix series, is one of the world’s most popular science fiction writers. In this career-spanning collection of essays and short fiction, “readers get a look at the seeds of the ideas that shaped Liu’s oeuvre.” For anyone interested in a view of sci-fi from China, the book offers “a galaxy of rewards.” Fourteen Days by the Authors Guild (Harper, $32)

Born during the pandemic, this collaborative novel is “an immensely enjoyable product of an immensely unenjoyable time,” said Alex Clark in The Guardian. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston marshaled 36 writers, including John Grisham and Celeste Ng, to contribute stories set in one Manhattan tenement building. Some entries are dark, some sweet, and none of the authors are revealed until the end, adding to the tale an “extra fillip of uncertainty.”