SURVIVAL MATH: Notes on an All-American Family, by Mitchell S. Jackson. (Scribner, 315 pp., $17.) In this memoir about growing up black in mostly white Oregon amid gangs, guns and addiction, Jackson recounts how he forged an idea of honorable masculinity from bits and pieces of the struggling adults around him. In these pages, Darnell L. Moore said the book is “a model of autobiographical writing.”

FIGURING, by Maria Popova. (Vintage, 578 pp., $18.) Popova, the creator of the popular intellectual blog Brain Pickings, explores the lives and ideas of exceptional people ranging over four centuries, some obscure, like Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer born in 1780, some not, like the Americans Margaret Fuller and Rachel Carson. “Ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying,” Christine Kenneally said here.

KADDISH.COM, by Nathan Englander. (Vintage International, 203 pp., $16.) Raised Orthodox Jewish but now a doubter, the protagonist of Englander’s third novel hires a surrogate he finds on the internet to recite the thrice daily Kaddish prayers for his deceased father. Years later, he regrets his choice and seeks a do-over. Our reviewer, Tova Mirvis, called the book “tender, wry and entertaining.”

COURTING MR. LINCOLN, by Louis Bayard. (Algonquin, 396 pp., $16.95.) Told in chapters that alternate between the voices of Abraham Lincoln’s future wife, Mary Todd, and his confidant and roommate, Joshua Speed, this novel explores the personal connections that helped form Lincoln’s character when he was a country lawyer. Bayard’s “depiction of Mary Todd is a revelation,” the Book Review’s Tina Jordan said.

MAMA’S LAST HUG: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, by Frans de Waal. (Norton, 324 pp., $16.95.) Emotions like love, fear, empathy and shame stretch across and connect species, de Waal demonstrates, showing how feelings are both measurable and evolutionarily crucial. “This book is full of the kind of facts you call up your best friend to share,” Sy Montgomery wrote here.

BLACK LEOPARD RED WOLF, by Marlon James. (Riverhead, 620 pp., $18.) The twisting plot of this surreal fantasy epic — James’s fourth novel and the first book in an announced trilogy — hinges on a hunter who is hired to search a dangerous, magical land for a missing boy, possibly the rightful heir to the throne of an ancient African empire. In these pages, Michiko Kakutani called it “a gripping, action-packed narrative.”