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In “How to Be a Renaissance Woman,” the historian Jill Burke explores the aesthetic expectations of an era — and just how they were achieved. (Recipes included.)

True to the promise of its title, “The Storm We Made” kicks up a weather system of epic proportions, ranging from military terror during World War II to domestic warmth.

This bracing anthology of Christopher Hitchens’s work for The London Review of Books is just the ticket.

In “Mercury,” Amy Jo Burns explores the conflicting loyalties and many secrets of a roofing clan in small-town Pennsylvania.

“Carnival of Dreams” collects surrealist photo collages by the Hong Kong artist who once designed graphics for “Monty Python.”

Four new books look to fauna to get us through tough times.

Not many, according to a new collection of correspondence from a science fiction master.

Philip Norman, the author of books about Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the Beatles as a group, discovers that Harrison was, among other things, a puzzle.

In “Things That Go Bump in the Universe,” the astronomer C. Renée James writes about what we can learn from the more exotic shapes and sounds in outer space.

A new biography and a career-spanning collection of Anthony Hecht’s work show how fluent he was in his period’s style, and hint at the ways it might have restrained him.