Jong’s 1973 novel, a feminist classic, follows Isadora Wing as she chases pleasure, self-knowledge and ever-elusive freedom. It’s “a sexual self-portrait, kin to the self-examinations women’s groups undertook on living room floors,” Jane Kamensky wrote in her appraisal of the book on its 50th anniversary. “It is also a road novel, a hedonist-feminist Kerouac.”

Dionne, a journalist and critic, uses her own life experiences and pop cultural data to create “an excavation of a culture that hates fat people,” a feeling that manifests in everything from motherhood, friendship and online dating to medical diagnoses and treatment.

After their mother’s death, Gopi and her sisters find solace in neither their distant father nor their British-Gujarati community. Instead, they play squash. When Gopi shows talent, the game becomes a dual pathway — out past the cultural and class barriers of her world, and into her own grief, allowing her the space “to submit to the void and find her footing within it,” our reviewer wrote.

Brown’s heroic history charts the path of nine working-class men from the “gray time” of the Depression-era West Coast to the podium, where they beat the German rowing team for the gold medal at Hitler’s Olympics.

A design critic takes stock of American malls, from their postwar rise in the 1950s to their role in surveillance, their ambiguity as public and private spaces and their decline in the era of online shopping. “Whether malls will abide — whether they should — remains to be seen,” Molly Young wrote in her review.