In 1957, Franklin Kameny was fired from a government job for being gay. His bold fight against bias, Eric Cervini shows in “The Deviant’s War,” inspired a movement.
In his first installment of a new series on overlooked or under-read American writers, A.O. Scott, a critic at large for The New York Times, considers Wallace Stegner, the Western novelist who captured, and criticized, his region’s individualistic spirit.
In William Shivering’s “Thieves of Weirdwood,” a mirror city’s buildings and streets physically reflect the hopes and fears of a “normal,” grim, Dickensian city’s residents.
“The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett, considers fraught questions of racial identity, personal freedom and community in a story that stretches from the Jim Crow South to 1980s Los Angeles.