word

Hardcover fiction

1. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown: $28) A lifelong letter writer reckons with a painful past.

2. Brimstone by Callie Hart (Forever: $33) The deluxe limited edition continues the fantasy adventure begun in “Quicksilver.”

3. Heart the Lover by Lily King (Grove Press: $28) A woman reflects on a youthful love triangle and its consequences.

4. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Knopf: $30) A genre-bending love story about people and the words they leave behind.

5. Queen Esther by John Irving (Simon & Schuster: $30) The novelist revisits his bestselling “The Cider House Rules.”

6. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth: $32) The fates of two young people intersect and diverge across continents and years.

7. Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books: $28) An accomplished actor grapples with the varied roles she plays in her personal life.

8. Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press: $30) A private eye in 1932 Milwaukee is hired to find a missing dairy heiress.

9. The Black Wolf by Louise Penny (Minotaur Books: $30) The latest mystery in the Armand Gamache series.

10. Dog Show by Billy Collins, Pamela Sztybel (illustrator) (Random House: $20) The former U.S. poet laureate captures the essence of dogs in a collection of poems that includes watercolor canine portraits.

…

Hardcover nonfiction

1. 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking: $35) An exploration of the most infamous stock market crash in history.

2. Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Random House: $30) A new memoir from the legendary writer and artist.

3. Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Knopf: $35) A posthumous memoir by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s most outspoken victim.

4. Something From Nothing by Alison Roman (Clarkson Potter: $38) More than 100 recipes that make the most of a well-stocked pantry.

5. The Uncool by Cameron Crowe (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $35) The filmmaker recounts his experiences as a teenage music journalist.

6. Lessons From Cats for Surviving Fascism by Stewart Reynolds (Grand Central Publishing: $13) A guide to channeling feline wisdom in the face of authoritarian nonsense.

7. Always Remember by Charlie Mackesy (Penguin Life: $27) Revisiting the world of “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.”

8. Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday: $35) The author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” tells her story.

9. Good Things by Samin Nosrat (Random House: $45) The celebrated chef shares 125 meticulously tested recipes.

10. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can’t control.

…

Paperback fiction

1. On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle (New Directions: $16)

2. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Ballantine: $22)

3. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Vintage: $19)

4. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18)

5. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17)

6. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Vintage: $18)

7. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20)

8. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, Barbara J. Haveland (translator) (New Directions: $16)

9. The Princess Bride by William Goldman (Harper Perennial: $22)

10. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage: $19)

…

Paperback nonfiction

1. Fight Oligarchy by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Crown: $15)

2. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $24)

3. The White Album by Joan Didion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18)

4. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions: $22)

5. Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco: $19)

6. The Most Human by Adam Nimoy (Chicago Review Press: $20)

7. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18)

8. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)

9. The Best American Essays 2025 by Jia Tolentino and Kim Dana Kupperman (editors) (Mariner Books: $19)

10. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Picador: $19)

Hardcover fiction

1. The Black Wolf by Louise Penny (Minotaur Books: $30) The latest mystery in the Armand Gamache series.

2. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown: $28) A lifelong letter writer reckons with a painful past.

3. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Knopf: $30) A genre-bending love story about people and the words they leave behind.

4. The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown & Co.: $32) The Lincoln Lawyer is back with a case against an AI company for its role in a girl’s killing.

5. The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown (Doubleday: $38) Symbologist Robert Langdon takes on a mystery involving human consciousness and ancient mythology.

6. Alchemised by SenLinYu (Del Rey: $35) A woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy.

7. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth: $32) The fates of two young people intersect and diverge across continents and years.

8. Heart the Lover by Lily King (Grove Press: $28) A woman reflects on a youthful love triangle and its consequences.

9. Queen Esther by John Irving (Simon & Schuster: $30) The novelist revisits the world of his bestselling “The Cider House Rules.”

10. The Widow by John Grisham (Doubleday: $32) A small-time lawyer accused of murder races to find the real killer to clear his name.

…

Hardcover nonfiction

1. Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Random House: $30) A new memoir from the legendary writer and artist.

2. 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking: $35) An exploration of the most infamous stock market crash in history.

3. Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Knopf: $35) A posthumous memoir by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s most outspoken victim.

4. Lessons From Cats for Surviving Fascism by Stewart Reynolds (Grand Central Publishing: $13) A guide to channeling feline wisdom in the face of authoritarian nonsense.

5. Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday: $35) The author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” tells her story.

6. Always Remember by Charlie Mackesy (Penguin Life: $27) Revisiting the world of “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.”

7. The Uncool by Cameron Crowe (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $35) The filmmaker recounts his experiences as a teenage music journalist.

8. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins, Sawyer Robbins (Hay House: $30) The podcast host explains how to stop wasting energy on things you can’t control.

9. Giving Up Is Unforgivable by Joyce Vance (Dutton: $28) A rallying cry for citizen engagement to preserve American democracy.

10. Notes on Being a Man by Scott Galloway (Simon & Schuster: $29) The NYU professor and podcaster explores what it means to be a man in modern America.

…

Paperback fiction

1. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead Books: $19)

2. How About Now by Kate Baer (Harper Perennial: $18)

3. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Vintage: $18)

4. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Ballantine: $22)

5. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17)

6. The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (Vintage: $19)

7. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18)

8. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20)

9. The Housemaid by Freida McFadden (Grand Central: $19)

10. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: $18)

…

Paperback nonfiction

1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12)

2. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21)

3. Fight Oligarchy by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Crown: $15)

4. How to Know a Person by David Brooks (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $20)

5. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions: $22)

6. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Picador: $19)

7. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18)

8. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)

9. Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson (Dial Press Trade Paperback: $22)

10. The Best American Essays 2025 by Jia Tolentino and Kim Dana Kupperman (editors) (Mariner Books: $19)

Nearly a decade after his 2016 novel, “All That Man Is,” was passed over for the Booker Prize, David Szalay has taken home gold with his latest work, “Flesh.”

“Flesh,” Szalay’s sixth novel, follows István, a socially isolated Hungarian teen who through circumstances beyond his control is thrust into London’s upper echelon. In the coming decades, he finds himself caught between his traumatic past and growing appetite for prestige. Szalay is the first Hungarian British writer to receive the prestigious award, which he accepted at Monday’s ceremony in London with visible surprise.

“I felt ‘Flesh’ is quite a risky novel, a risky book. It felt risky to me writing it,” Szalay said in his acceptance speech.

“I think it’s very important that the publisher — the novel-making community, if I can put it like that — embraces that sense of risk rather than shuns it,” he said.

In the judges’ view, Szalay’s risks more than paid off, yielding an “extraordinary, singular novel.”

“The judges discussed the six books on the shortlist for more than five hours,” said Roddy Doyle, chair of the judging panel. “The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the other great novels, was ‘Flesh’ — because of its singularity.”

“We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read,” he said.

Despite chronicling decades of István’s life, “Flesh,” through narrative omissions, leaves readers with an inscrutable protagonist they nonetheless remain deeply invested in.

“I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well,” Doyle said, adding that in “Flesh,” “Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter.”

The Booker Prize is an annual award given to the best English-language novel published in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“Flesh” triumphed over five other shortlisted books: Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” Andrew Miller’s “The Land in Winter,” Susan Choi’s “Flashlight,” Katie Kitamura’s “Audition” and Ben Markovits’ “The Rest of Our Lives.”

“Flesh” has also received praise from writer Zadie Smith and singer Dua Lipa, who selected the novel for her Service95 Book Club.

“I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a character who has so little to say as István and yet by the end of it I cared about him so deeply,” Lipa told Szalay in an October interview at the New York Public Library.

During their conversation, Szalay shared that while “Flesh” was the file name for the book on his computer, he never expected it to get to the final press.

Yet his team couldn’t think of another title more fitting for the novel.

“The kind of slight unease that I think it provokes, that sense of tawdriness, I think that they really fit the book, ultimately,” Szalay said.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court’s conservatives face a test of their own making this week as they decide whether President Trump had the legal authority to impose tariffs on imports from nations across the globe.

At issue are import taxes that are paid by American businesses and consumers.

Small-business owners had sued, including a maker of “learning toys” in Illinois and a New York importer of wines and spirits. They said Trump’s ever-changing tariffs had severely disrupted their businesses, and they won rulings declaring the president had exceeded his authority.

On Wednesday, the justices will hear their first major challenge to Trump’s claims of unilateral executive power. And the outcome is likely to turn on three doctrines that have been championed by the court’s conservatives.

First, they say the Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning. Its opening words say: “All legislative powers … shall be vested” in Congress, and the elected representatives “shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposes and excises.”

Second, they believe the laws passed by Congress should be interpreted based on their words. They call this “textualism,” which rejects a more liberal and open-ended approach that included the general purpose of the law.

Trump and his lawyers say his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were authorized by the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA.

That 1977 law says the president may declare a national emergency to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” involving national security, foreign policy or the economy of the United States. Faced with such an emergency, he may “investigate, block … or regulate” the “importation or exportation” of any property.

Trump said the nation’s “persistent” balance of payments deficit over five decades was such an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”

In the past, the law has been used to impose sanctions or freeze the assets of Iran, Syria and North Korea or groups of terrorists. It does not use the words “tariffs” or “duties,” and it had not been used for tariffs prior to this year.

The third doctrine arose with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and is called the “major questions” doctrine.

He and the five other conservatives said they were skeptical of far-reaching and costly regulations issued by the Obama and Biden administrations involving matters such as climate change, student loan forgiveness or mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for 84 million Americans.

Congress makes the laws, not federal regulators, they said in West Virginia vs. Environmental Protection Agency in 2022.

And unless there is a “clear congressional authorization,” Roberts said the court will not uphold assertions of “extravagant statutory power over the national economy.”

Now all three doctrines are before the justices, since the lower courts relied on them in ruling against Trump.

No one disputes that the president could impose sweeping worldwide tariffs if he had sought and won approval from the Republican-controlled Congress. However, he insisted the power was his alone.

In a social media post, Trump called the case on tariffs “one of the most important in the History of the Country. If a President is not allowed to use Tariffs, we will be at a major disadvantage against all other Countries throughout the World, especially the ‘Majors.’ In a true sense, we would be defenseless! Tariffs have brought us Great Wealth and National Security in the nine months that I have had the Honor to serve as President.”

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer, his top courtroom attorney, argues that tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security. And if so, the court should defer to the president.

“IEEPA authorizes the imposition of regulatory tariffs on foreign imports to deal with foreign threats — which crucially differ from domestic taxation,” he wrote last month.

For the same reason, “the major questions doctrine … does not apply here,” he said. It is limited to domestic matters, not foreign affairs, he argued.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh has sounded the same note in the past.

Sauer will also seek to persuade the court that the word “regulate” imports includes imposing tariffs.

The challengers are supported by prominent conservatives, including Stanford law professor Michael McConnell.

In 2001, he and John Roberts were nominated for a federal appeals court at the same time by President George W. Bush, and he later served with now-Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

He is the lead counsel for one group of small-business owners.

“This case is what the American Revolution was all about. A tax wasn’t legitimate unless it was imposed by the people’s representatives,” McConnell said. “The president has no power to impose taxes on American citizens without Congress.”

His brief argues that Trump is claiming a power unlike any in American history.

“Until the 1900s, Congress exercised its tariff power directly, and every delegation since has been explicit and strictly limited,” he wrote in Trump vs. V.O.S. Selections. “Here, the government contends that the President may impose tariffs on the American people whenever he wants, at any rate he wants, for any countries and products he wants, for as long as he wants — simply by declaring longstanding U.S. trade deficits a national ‘emergency’ and an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat,’ declarations the government tells us are unreviewable. The president can even change his mind tomorrow and back again the day after that.”

He said the “major questions” doctrine fully applies here.

Two years ago, he noted the court called Biden’s proposed student loan forgiveness “staggering by any measure” because it could cost more than $430 billion. By comparison, he said, the Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs will impose $1.7 trillion in new taxes on Americans by 2035.

The case figures to be a major test of whether the Roberts court will put any legal limits on Trump’s powers as president.

But the outcome will not be the final word on tariffs. Administration officials have said that if they lose, they will seek to impose them under other federal laws that involve national security.

Still pending before the court is an emergency appeal testing the president’s power to send National Guard troops to American cities over the objection of the governor and local officials.

Last week, the court asked for further briefs on the Militia Act of 1908, which says the president may call up the National Guard if he cannot “with the regular forces … execute the laws of the United States.”

The government had assumed the regular forces were the police and federal agents, but a law professor said the regular forces in the original law referred to the military.

The justices asked for a clarification from both sides by Nov. 17.