1. Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Make it funnier. Make it meaner,” Rodgers directed Green in their last session collaborating on her exuberant memoir, because “she wanted readers to have a good time.” Rodgers, best known for the musical comedy for Once Upon a Mattress, was the daughter of composer Richard Rodgers and a mother who thought a daughter was to be “a chambermaid crossed with a lapdog.” Green, chief theater critic for the New York Times, captures the repartee of their years of conversations, and he enriches Rodgers’ story with footnote-like asides and details, vivifying her as well as the golden age of American musical theater. There are plenty of bold-face names for those hungry for star power: As a child she really did play chess with Stephen Sondheim, then later date Hal Prince, and come upon a “gawky woman gobbling a peach, her hair still braided up like a challah” – Barbra Streisand. Seeming confident in his supporting role, Green allows disarming, self-deprecating Mary Rodgers to shine. “Restaurant checks had a way of disappearing,” Green writes of her familiar line: “When your father writes Oklahoma! you can pay for dinner.”

2. Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by David Maraniss (Simon & Schuster)

Jim Thorpe has been lionized in film and legend as one of the greatest athletes in American history, and in his sweeping biography, Washington Post associate editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Maraniss has unearthed evidence and pulled away the shrouds of myth – drawing from his immersion into sports history acquired in his earlier biographies of Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente He reveals tenacious, resilient Thorpe with nuance and insight, Maraniss has also written a social history of the warped government policies regarding Native Americans, erasing Indigenous culture in favor of assimilation, so that Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma, was one of thousands of Native children sent away to boarding schools in an attempt to wipe out their Indigenous spirit.

3. Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris by Mark Braude (W.W. Norton)

In the life story of how Alice Ernestine Prin, a poor young woman who left Burgundy for Paris, dreamt of falling in love with an artist and became a model renamed Kiki for the Jewish New Yorker who became famous as Man Ray, Braude has captured the rich bohemian life of interwar Paris. In his robust cultural history, Braude evokes the dynamics of the era through the lens of Kiki, Man Ray’s overlooked muse who, over their stormy years together, made herself a full-fledged artistic force in his work. In recovering Kiki, Braude recalls a great act of self-creation as she made herself a work of art.

4. Cyclorama by Adam Langer (Bloomsbury)

Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercises meets The Breakfast Club movie in Langer’s propulsive novel, marked with his sharp cultural insights and uncanny talent for seasoning tragedy with wit that raises moral questions as he quotes Otto Frank with his haunting epigraph: “We don’t need the Nazis to destroy us; we’re destroying ourselves.” Opening Cyclorama in 1982, Langer begins with The Diary of Anne Frank, the annual spring play for a suburban Chicago high school, featuring insecure teenagers vying for roles in the drama, with a manipulative Machiavellian director plagued with his own demons. When cast members meet up as 50-somethings in 2016, it becomes clear that each has been shaped by the play and their role in it, and that they had been profoundly influenced by the behavior of their charismatic director in ways that they had not fully realized.

5. Fruit Punch by Kendra Allen (Ecco)

Allen’s original, fractured account of her coming of age in Dallas in the 1990s feels wholly authentic, beginning with her Author’s Note, in which she tells readers “know that you don’t gotta finish it,” acknowledging potential triggers of sexual assault, blood, and emotional and physical violence. Allen writes with a light touch about universal adolescent anxieties – “Heartbreak!” is a familiar refrain – but also captures the particulars of her complicated world, beginning with her mother. “Men are jealous. She say all the time. It’s one of my first lessons on life.” Linear narrative defies life, and Allen deftly breaks lines of text and even includes lists, like the rules of her great-great-uncle’s Southern Baptist church: “No bare legs. No questions.” She adds that she stopped going the first chance she got.