Recent books of interest:

A BEAUTIFUL CRIME, by Christopher Bollen. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.) In this elegant crime thriller, a couple of New Yorkers contrive to sell counterfeit antiques to an unsuspecting American expat in Venice, but all does not go according to plan.

DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE, by Gary Indiana. (Semiotext(e), paper, $15.95.) First published in 2001, Indiana’s stylish mother-and-son crime novel (the last in a trilogy) draws on the real-life con artists and murderers Sante and Kenneth Kimes to cast a jaundiced eye on the hollowness of America’s capitalist culture.

MINOR FEELINGS: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong. (One World, $27.) An acclaimed poet, Hong turns here to essays parsing the “messy lived realities” of contemporary identity politics. “Innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration,” she writes. “If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.”

THE FREEDOM ARTIST, by Ben Okri. (Akashic, cloth, $30.95; paper, $16.95.) A woman is arrested for asking an uncomfortable question, and her lover goes looking for her. With the stark power of myth, this political allegory evolves into an argument for artistic freedom.

SISTER OUTSIDER, by Audre Lorde. (Penguin Classics, $26.) This reissue of Lorde’s 1984 essay collection will introduce a new generation to her incisive diagnosis of Western pathologies and her lucid celebration of difference.

What we’re reading:

My wife and I are in the fog of raising two kids under 3 years old right now, so I don’t read many books without illustrations these days. But a few months ago, she insisted I read PACHINKO, by Min Jin Lee. This beautifully written story of an ethnic Korean family living as second-class citizens in Japan is a compelling read all on its own, but it struck a chord with us for personal reasons. I am Japanese and my Korean-American wife’s parents were raised in Japan. The book offered a glimpse of what life must have been like for them and her grandparents, who encountered discrimination throughout their lives in my home country but rarely speak about it. But what makes the book impossible to put down is how elegantly Min Jin Lee captures the heartache of her characters and how she moves across this sprawling family saga from one generation to the next. In reading this tale about family, we learned a little bit more about ours.

—Daisuke Wakabayashi, technology reporter