7 New Books We Recommend This Week

Time and space break free of their usual constraints in some of this week’s recommended books: Marcus Chown’s “A Crack in Everything” dives deep into the fathomless world of black holes and the physicists who study them, while the first two entries in Solvej Balle’s seven-part novel “On the Calculation of Volume” trap the protagonist in a dizzying time-loop narrative to profound effect. (Also defying the laws of physics is Bob, the titular character in Maggie Su’s novel “Blob,” who slowly transforms from a shapeless lump into the perfect man.)

Other books we recommend this week include Dorian Lynskey’s study of the role the apocalypse plays in the cultural imagination, Caleb Femi’s rave-influenced poetry collection and new novels by Adam Ross and Mischa Berlinski. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

Ross’s semi-autobiographical second novel, set in New York City in the early 1980s, follows the travails of a successful child actor caught in the throes of a complicated relationship with a married woman. The novel is detailed, digressive, densely populated and capable of tracking the most minute shifts in emotional weather.

Chown, an astronomer turned author, tells the stories of scientists on the quest to demystify black holes — those afterlives of too-big, burned-out stars swallowed by their own gravity, creating an infinitely dense pit where the laws of physics just stop making sense. Chown’s book is primarily a chronicle of the researchers who helped make black holes believable, however uncanny they remain.

Apollo | $30

Set at a fictional all-night dance party in South London, and illustrated with the author’s own photographs, this poetry collection by a Nigerian British writer (his second) offers astute observations on the joys of rhythm and movement. The book’s sonnets and scattered monologues throw out images that stick with you; the dancing is all impulse and appetite.

MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Paperback, $18

Berlinski’s shrewd comic novel finds a veteran actress reconnecting with her disgraced mentor — a director whose #MeToo troubles got him expelled from his own legendary East Village company — while she faces the challenge of playing Cleopatra.

Lynskey, a British cultural journalist, chronicles our centuries-old obsession with doomsday scenarios: In pop culture, the end of the world is always nigh. With the kind of omnivorous sensibility essential for a project like this, Lynskey suggests that insofar as apocalyptic stories depict a collective experience, however grim, they make us feel less alone.

Pantheon | $32

Balle’s thrilling seven-volume meditation on time, translated by Barbara J. Haveland, takes place on an endless Nov. 18 that gives the time-loop narrative new and stunning proportions. Over the course of these first two volumes to appear in English, the protagonist becomes an expert noticer, a cleareyed cataloger of the celestial, the meteorological, the dropped conversations of passers-by, the minutiae of her memories: a stirring confrontation with reality that feels genuinely new.

New Directions | Paperback, $15.95 each

Su’s debut novel is a semi-surreal exploration of love, loneliness and coming of age. Vi, a 24-year-old half-Asian college dropout in a Midwestern town, struggles with disconnection and self-discovery until she encounters a strange blob that she gradually fashions into her perfect mate, only to see him rebel.