Tussling with the unknown always comes with inescapable risks, but men generally only find madness and heartache when they start looking for meaning in an impossible universe. Gentler than Melville but less redemptive than Coelho’s magnum opus, The Alchemist (1993), this unpredictable adventure novel offers a heady reflection on science, faith, and the necessity of myth. Sampson “Gentle” Montgomery is a man in profound grief, soothed only by heroic doses of “Sweet Vitriol,” a potent combination of opium and laudanum. His best friend and scientific partner, Liam O’Kelly, is dead, killed by a gargantuan alabaster salamander terrorizing the Pacific Northwest circa the 1890s. Gentle is convinced that he can use his partner’s knowledge of alchemy, combined with the beast’s blood, to resurrect Liam from the grave. But a hunting trip takes money, a problem soon solved when Gentle’s runaway nephew, Kitt, shows up at his door, fleeing habitual abuse from his father, Gentle’s cruel brother, Emmanuel. Together, they head into the frontiers of Washington State, armed only with a copy of Liam’s alchemical spellbook, but they’re not alone. Before long, they’ve run afoul of a hypermasculine hunter named Hercules Belmont and a maniacal frontier warlord, Reverend Judge Malcolm Crane, not to mention a nihilist death cult, infected by apocalyptic visions generated by the animal they’ve dubbed “Leviathan.” Costa’s debut uses familiar building blocks, from the inherent quest for an impossible creature to the frontier violence that works so memorably in Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025). Whether Gentle is a visionary or a drunk, whether the salamander is a creature of flesh or a shared delusion, and ultimately, the meaning of the mission is as much about human frailty and grace as the nightmares that stalk the page.

Early in this sometimes difficult text, which owes much to fellow Collège de France professor Michel Foucault, Boucheron distinguishes analytical logic from fiction, noting that whereas the former gives the illusion that the world is logical, the latter “reveals to us the possibilities of thought.” The stories that critique or shore up political discourses, whether, as Boucheron goes on to examine, the films of Charlie Chaplin or medieval art and modern novels, describe “a reality that does not yet exist.” Yet sometimes it does: As Boucheron, a medievalist, writes, numerous monarchs have attempted to legitimate their rule by revealing dreams that placed them in world-changing contexts. One was the English king William II, who, troubled by a dream in which he consumed human flesh, sought the counsel of a priest, who told him boldly and baldly that he had consumed Christ, “and being a tyrant you devoured him whole.” Fictions differ from facts, of course; in a sharp analysis, the author distinguishes lies, which acknowledge that there is an objective truth, from the “bullshit” of Donald Trump and minions: “The bullshitter couldn’t care less about truth and is just looking to dominate.” Boucheron’s text, drawn from a series of lectures, is sometimes repetitive, both allusive and elusive, and often nebulous in a Parisian intellectual sort of way (and never mind that he snaps, “Intellectuals are the first to concede to tyranny because it allows them, basically, to set themselves off from the people”). All the same, in a narrative that wanders from the subversions of medieval epics to the cynical prescriptions of Machiavelli, Boucheron closes with a dour and timely note from Klaus Mann about how power works: “It’s as if people are afflicted with a kind of physical repugnance for the truth.”

Readers who fell in love with Just Kids (2010), Smith’s National Book Award–winning memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, but were less taken with follow-ups—featuring a lot of elegant writing about very little—are advised to give her another shot. The question of that grave, seemingly Victorian young woman who materialized on a park bench in New York City in the first pages of Just Kids and where she came from is answered in an engrossing first section covering Smith’s Dickensian childhood in the late 1940s, including tuberculosis, an iceman, a ragman, a glass inkwell at school, and this heartbreaker: “On Christmas Eve after a long day waiting tables, before she boarded the crowded bus home, my mother bought two large lollipops and two small hand-painted wooden penguins for our stockings, all she could afford. When she got off a strap dangled; some­one had cut it and made off with her shoulder bag.” Her romance with and marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, a spiritual twin, fellow traveler, and father of her two children, is lovingly evoked, as are her close friendships with William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Michael Stipe, Allen Ginsberg, and her brother and tour manager, Todd; when Fred and Todd died less than a month apart in 1994, she went into a tailspin. Who else but Fred would ever be able to join her in the game of choosing a Jackson Pollock painting and interpreting it musically as “unfettered cries for the chaos of the world”? A fascinating part of the book deals with Smith’s discovery, after both parents have died, that her sister is only her half-sibling—she digs up the truth with the help of a child she gave up for adoption at age 20, with whom she’s since reunited. The reality of her parentage made a surprising kind of sense, once she knew. Included are numerous black-and-white photographs chronicling the writer’s rich life.

Midway through his handsomely illustrated study of mapmaking, Cheshire quotes diarist Harold Nicolson’s eyewitness account of President Woodrow Wilson kneeling over a map at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, tracing new borders with his finger. The scene captures the book’s central concern: our enduring desire to organize the world through cartography. As the writer Peter Turchi has noted—a line Cheshire quotes—“The first lie of a map, also the first lie of fiction, is that it is the truth.” A professor of geographic information and cartography at University College London, Cheshire writes from inside the university’s Map Library, a warren of drawers containing 40,000 maps. He is an infectious guide, tracing how maps evolved from hand-tinted curiosities to instruments of science, propaganda, and power. During World War II, the Allies printed billions of map sheets and raided Axis archives for more, including nine tons seized from a single German publisher. Yet even the most precise charts could not capture the mud and confusion of the trenches; tidiness, he shows, often conceals chaos. Victorian mapmakers such as George Bellas Greenough and Heinrich Berghaus turned geography into both art and ideology. Ethnographic maps hardened into justifications for empire and war, while national atlases—like Finland’s in 1899—helped invent the very nations they depicted. Not everyone approved of cartography’s instinct to capture a changing world. When the art critic John Ruskin ordered a map from Stanfords of Covent Garden (still in business), he insisted it omit the new railway lines, calling them the “oddest” of “stupidities of modern education.” To “tidy the map,” Cheshire reminds us, is to risk mistaking lines on paper for the real world they seek to contain.

George is the author of Ninety Percent of Everything (2013), a revelatory and unexpectedly funny book about the shipping industry. In her latest work, she returns to the sea to focus on the fishing industry, another subject that, despite the prevalence of seafood, most of us know little about. It’s a startling account; much of what she shares will hit readers like a blast of shoreline wind. The details are unsettling. “Fish for awful statistics about ocean creatures and you will land a giant catch,” she writes. “For every 300 turtles that swam in the Caribbean, there is now one.” Industrialized fishing has been so destructive that “we spend twice as much effort to catch the same number of fishes as we did in the 1950s.” Huge numbers of other creatures are accidentally captured: In this “bycatch”—the industry term is “discards”—300,000 whales and dolphins are killed every year. This doesn’t even take into account illegal fishing. “One in every five fishes imported by Americans is illegally caught,” the author writes. And then there’s the nasty business of unwanted guests that plague salmon farms, leaving fish “half-eaten by lice.” In her travels, George spends time with fishermen in her native Britain. The crew’s blunt humor is evident when she vomits overboard: “More food for lobsters,” they say. In a stirring chapter on bygone “herring girls” who gutted fish hour after hour, George describes how these women fought for better safety. It’s still a dangerous profession: Every year, 100,000 fishermen die on the job. It doesn’t help that in the U.S., there’s a lack of training. Some observers, meantime, have mysteriously lost their lives when reporting on human rights violations. All the while, demand for seafood is rising. “By 2050, our fish consumption is predicted to double,” George writes. “Where will it come from?” It’s little surprise that George herself does not eat fish.