“The whole book is excellent,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. (Liveright, $39.95.) In these personal writings, the author of “Strangers on a Train,” the Ripley series and many other novels mediates between her intense appetite for work and her need to lose herself in art, gin, music and warm bodies. Gregory Cowles Senior Editor, Books Twitter: HIGHSMITH: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941-1995, edited by Anna von Planta. In more contemporary matters, we also recommend John McWhorter’s take on “woke” culture, Farah Stockman’s look at the human costs of industrial decline and the conclusion to Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic series, about a family of witches. There’s family history, in Kevin Young’s poetry collection “Stones,” and historical fiction, in Abir Mukherjee’s crime novel “The Shadows of Men,” set in Raj-era Calcutta. History anchors many of this week’s recommended titles - whether it’s the literary history behind the making of “Crime and Punishment” and Patricia Highsmith’s diaries, or the constitutional history of Abraham Lincoln’s approach to ending slavery, or the living history of monuments to the past and how we deal with them as attitudes and societies change over time.
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