Oscar Martello is a misogynistic, bullying, corrupt and famous movie producer in Rome. His hedonistic world of celebrity comes to life with striking detail in We'll Sleep When We're Old, the debut novel by Italian journalist and television producer Pino Corrias.

Martello loves power and money more than anything: "I'm an anarchist, I dismantle power and I pocket it." He lies, cheats and carelessly betrays friends, wives, lovers and coworkers with tacit approval because his influence seems limitless. When one of his movies appears to flounder, Martello devises what seems to be the perfect publicity stunt to turn critical opinion and ensure his profit. He secretly sends Andrea Serrano, a screenwriter and the closest thing to a friend Martello has, and Jacaranda Rizzi, the beautiful but unstable star of the movie, to Paris in a disappearing act. The media frenzy over the actress's whereabouts will boost the movie, Martello knows, and he's right. But when Jacaranda leaves Paris and cannot be found and, simultaneously, Italian police investigate Martello's connection to money laundering and corruption, his world begins to collapse and his capacity for cruelty comes back to haunt him.

We'll Sleep When We're Old, with action between Rome and Paris, vividly describes the debauchery in Martello's world of La Dolce Roma, where "everyone is so damned guilty that no one ever really is." Even the most unlikable characters--of which Martello tops the list--are multidimensional and not merely vile. Fans of Elmore Leonard and Boogie Nights will enjoy this wild ride. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

Twelve-year-old David "Green" Greenfeld is one of only two white kids in his South Boston school. Narrator of Sam Graham-Felsen's first novel, Green, he speaks a hip-hop patois with self-conscious concern that he not sound as uncool as his skin color suggests he is: "Awesome is a Caucasian catastrophe." His parents are Harvard-grad former hippies who won't send him to a private school because they "believe" in public schools. Green is a coming-of-age story set in the '90s, about a white boy trying to fit in among his black peers.

In time, Green makes friends with Marlon, a shy kid from the projects who is a curious reader and has a premier collection of video highlights from Celtics games. With a rarely discussed family life at home, Marlon prefers to hang at Green's place, where his parents dote and encourage both boys to study hard for the admission test for Boston Latin School, the prestigious public school from which acceptance into Harvard is almost assured. But this is a novel about adolescent boys growing into manhood. Hitting the books is way down their priority list, below standing up to violent bullies and figuring out how sex works. As Green laments, "You turn my age and you can never be soft again."

Journalist, Columbia MFA graduate and former chief blogger for the 2008 Obama campaign, Graham-Felsen is after more than a Tom Sawyer take on adolescence. Green tackles the nuances of how class and race throw up inflexible barriers preventing a healthy integration of a diverse population. Funny and on the money, Green is a perceptive first novel. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Officer Ellery Hathaway knows another death is coming to her town of Woodbury, Mass. But no one will believe her, definitely not the chief of police. Why is Ellery so certain? Because for the past three years, a local resident has disappeared around her birthday, after Ellery receives a birthday card from an anonymous sender. But no one is supposed to know who she really is.

Fourteen years ago, Ellery was 14-year-old Abigail, the sole survivor of a serial killer of young women. Abigail had been kidnapped on her birthday. After her ordeal, she switched to using her middle name, and the only person who knows her true identity is her rescuer, FBI agent Reed Markham. Since another birthday--i.e., the Vanishing Season--is fast approaching, Ellery now calls him for help in stopping a possible copycat killer and the past from destroying her sanity.

In her debut, Joanna Schaffhausen has created an arresting protagonist who's as strong as she is vulnerable. Though Ellery now knows how to protect herself, she's afflicted by PTSD and survivor's guilt: "Ellie wasn't suicidal; she'd fought hard for her life and won. But sometimes, especially during the longest nights, she did wonder if maybe the other girls had been luckier after all." Markham is haunted by the victims he didn't save. The killer isn't as well fleshed out; his motives remain unclear. The reward lies more in seeing how two damaged people work together to beat back demons only they can see and end up saving each other. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

A self-proclaimed "carnivore of pop culture," Jamaican-born George Wayne is known for the snarky and inappropriate questions he lobs at celebrities in his brash q&a column for Vanity Fair magazine. Anyone Who's Anyone collects 44 of those jousting matches. After telling Tony Curtis that most of his films are "unwatchable," Wayne asks him if he's had a testicle tuck. Curtis cops only to a nose job, "for a deviated septum from too much cocaine."

Wayne asks brawny model Fabio the measurement of his "third arm" and tells egocentric film producer Robert Evans, "You haven't had a hit movie for years!" He asks Milton Berle, "Do you still have orgasms?" His first question to Kate Moss is "What do you say to your critics who call you a chain-smoking anorexic supermodel?" But he often gets some candid responses--including Jackie Collins saying, "I don't read the Bible, but I feel that religion is responsible for all the ills in the world." It's also fun when Wayne meets his match with Kathleen Turner, Charlton Heston and Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello, who don't allow themselves to be insulted, misrepresented or corralled into cattiness.

Perhaps to remove some of the sting from his questions, Wayne always refers to himself in the third person (as "GW") and tries to get his subjects to talk about themselves the same way. Stargazers and gossip fans will enjoy this waspish collection of irreverent and engaging conversations. With each interview running a quick four to six pages, it's an enjoyable guilty pleasure. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Outside of physics, Enrico Fermi is not well known, despite having won the Nobel Prize. He ushered in the atomic age with his discovery of beta decay and his pioneering experiments with controlled nuclear fission. The latter led directly to the development of the first atomic bomb, which he helped oversee. The long shadow cast by the mushroom cloud may account for Fermi's obscurity, but MIT professor David Schwartz sets out to rectify this in The Last Man Who Knew Everything.

Fermi was a rare breed of scientist, equally comfortable with theory and experimentation. He made several breakthrough discoveries in his short life, each a pillar of nuclear and quantum physics. He devised and built the first nuclear reactor under the bleachers at the University of Chicago, and was a key member of the Manhattan Project team at Los Alamos. He was also a devoted teacher: many of his students would go on to win the Nobel Prize. "Fermi problems" were ingenious shortcuts to solving difficult problems with remarkable speed and accuracy--essentially, he invented napkin math. Jocular, athletic and disinclined toward philosophy or politics, he never strongly opposed fascism, though he eventually spoke out against development of the hydrogen bomb.

Cradle-to-grave biographies are difficult to dramatize, and a dearth of written correspondence doesn't make it easier. Schwartz admirably balances Fermi's life, work, context and personality. His descriptions of the science sometimes sizzle and sometimes slump, but he shines when tracing Fermi's journey through academic, political and military institutions. --Zak Nelson, writer and bookseller

On the night of September 26, 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Teachers College were riding in buses in the town of Iguala, Mexico, on their way to a demonstration. Suddenly the municipal, state and federal police opened fire on them, killing six, wounding many and "disappearing" 43. In a different part of the town, a fifth bus, carrying a boys' soccer team, was also attacked.

In Latin America, to "disappear" someone is a murderous crime, an act of violence. For I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us, John Gibler (To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War) has compiled first-hand accounts of the atrocities. These come from students who survived the assault, other eyewitnesses and parents of the disappeared. Although repetitious in places, each youth's retelling from his perspective helps to build the tension and disbelief each one felt through the long hours of that night. Why were the police attacking them? Why didn't anyone respond to their calls for help? Why were their friends taken away? As Gibler slowly reveals, the answers lie with illegal drugs being trafficked into the United States coupled with rampant violence and corruption sanctioned by the Mexican government.

The afterword is particularly important: it clears up details of that night as well as exposes the cover-ups, tampering with evidence and lies the police and government officials at the highest levels continue to insist are fact. By pulling together all these traumatic narratives, Gibler helps the parents of the disappeared throughout Mexico say, "Basta" (enough). They won't give up on searching for their loved ones and for the truth. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky doesn't seem to be slowing down much as he approaches the age of 90. In Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, a collection of interviews with journalist and frequent dialogue partner David Barsamian, Chomsky seems as lucid, energetic, and passionate as ever. The conversations range over an array of subjects, each one giving him a chance to show his impressive depth of knowledge and his commitment to a better world.

The interviews range from 2013, in the middle of Barack Obama's presidency, to 2017, with Donald Trump firmly ensconced in office. Chomsky certainly has opinions about the merits of each presidency, but is more concerned about the overall trajectory of U.S. diplomacy and power. Structures are more at play than people (though that hardly exculpates any of the particular people mentioned), and Chomsky is always underscoring that point in his positions.

The interview format works for some of these discussions. Barsamian has a habit of jumping around from subject to subject, asking Chomsky questions both about his early childhood and the state of global affairs. It keeps the conversation lively, but perhaps dulls the overall thrust of Global Discontent's aim to cajole and instigate. Still, reading the book is akin to spending quality informal time with one of the most powerful intellectuals of the 21st century, which is certainly worth it. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

Improvisational theater was invented and developed in the 20th-century United States, and continues to be a life spring of new ideas and talent for the performing arts, TV and film. Sam Wasson (Fosse) spent years writing Improv Nation from archival research and scores of interviews. The result is encyclopedic, garrulous and funny.

Improvisational theater requires its players to be receptive and generous with each other, competitive but also trusting, and to be fearless in front of an audience. The first games and rules of improv were devised by Viola Spolin, a Jewish Chicagoan working at the famous Hull House, which served new immigrant populations in Chicago. Working with children and then with adults at the Chicago WPA Recreation Project during the Great Depression, she developed "Theater Games" that encouraged people to open up and play together spontaneously onstage. Spolin's son, Paul Sills, founded the Compass Theater, whose members included the brilliant comedy duo Nichols and May. Some of its members went on to found the famous and influential Chicago improv theater Second City, which opened in 1959 to such instant success they didn't have to advertise. New theaters were founded in cities across the country, and the age of improv had arrived.

Wasson often seems thrilled and dazzled by his famous subjects, and his enthusiasm permeates this book. He has organized it chronologically, with reference to the major political and cultural events of each period. The intertwined story lines and Wasson's frequent digressions can sometimes feel a little chaotic, but the creative and social joy of improvisational theater, and the application of its principles to daily life, are the unifying themes. --Sara Catterall

Ilyasah Shabazz (X: A Novel) gives a fictionalized account of her mother's upbringing and move toward civil rights activism in Betty Before X, a collaborative novel with Renée Watson (Piecing Me Together).

Since Betty's mother, Ollie Mae, "didn't know how to raise a baby on her own," Betty was raised by her aunt until the age of six. When her aunt dies, Betty is sent back to Ollie Mae, who Betty believes loves her "but in a different kind of way"--even after five years, her "mother's house doesn't feel like home." Betty worries she'll be whipped for small mistakes and imagines running away from the mother who calls her "bad to the core." After a particularly bad beating, Betty runs to Mrs. Malloy, a church member who, Betty has seen, "knows how to love." Mrs. Malloy, who helped organize the Housewives' League and its boycott of businesses refusing to hire blacks, takes Betty in and inspires her to volunteer for the League.

Betty Before X poignantly depicts a young girl acutely aware of racism. In newspaper photographs of race riots, Betty thinks it's "hard to tell who the policemen were actually helping." At the sight of a hanging, Betty and her aunt drop their groceries and leave "the fruit and the bodies behind," making Betty wonder "which would rot faster." Yet Betty's interactions (learning to "count blessings" from Mrs. Malloy; dancing and prank calling with friends) illustrate the power of loved ones to bolster each other during hardship.

Based on recollections and printed interviews, with back matter for additional context, this moving novel illuminates and expands upon the defining events that helped shape a bold, passionate and dedicated civil rights figure. Readers will admire Betty's resolve and share in her joy as she finds the places she belongs. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer