Recent books of interest:

BROWN ALBUM: Essays on Exile and Identity, by Porochista Khakpour. (Vintage, paper, $16.) In these essays, spanning more than a decade, the Iranian-American novelist and memoirist reflects on assimilation and the burdens of being Middle Eastern in today’s America.

THE LAW OF LINES, by Hye-young Pyun. Translated by Sora Kim-Russell. (Arcade, $24.99.) Pyun’s simmering thriller, translated from the Korean, follows two young women grieving the loss of heavily indebted relatives: Se-oh’s father in a gas explosion, Ki-jeong’s half sister in a drowning. Both women suspect foul play.

THE PLANTER OF MODERN LIFE: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution, by Stephen Heyman. (Norton, $26.95.) Bromfield was a literary star of the Lost Generation — he won a Pulitzer in 1927 for his novel “Early Autumn” — but he gave up the writing life to become a devoted advocate of sustainable farming.

THE PRICE OF PEACE: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, by Zachary D. Carter. (Random House, $35.) With a wide angle, Carter shows how Keynes’s influential views on economics grew from concerns about war, philosophy and his theories of the good life.

LATITUDES OF LONGING, by Shubhangi Swarup. (One World, $27.) Swarup’s promising debut novel explores human connection to nature via four stories linked by an Indian government official and his mystically inclined wife.

What we’re reading:

These are — as we’ve heard ad nauseam — unprecedented times. So it should be no surprise that I spent this week demanding everyone read a book about a 19th-century ichthyological taxonomist-eugenicist-assassin, a hyphenate that makes my head spin.

Then again, it was already spinning from Lulu Miller’s book, WHY FISH DON’T EXIST, about the taxonomist and possible murderer David Starr Jordan, with whom Miller (a former NPR host) became obsessed during a troubled period of her life. Miller weaves an improbable but compelling theory of how his study of sessile sea squirts influenced the United States’ painful legacy of forced sterilization. And somehow — these are indeed strange times, so trust me here — she’s funny and touching too. At one point, Miller dives into the ocean into a school of fish herself, comes up for air, and realizes she’s in love. That’s how I felt: Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten.

—Sarah Maslin Nir, Metro reporter