HOMEY DON’T PLAY THAT!: The Story of “In Living Color” and the Black Comedy Revolution, by David Peisner. (37 Ink/Atria, $17.) Peisner explores the influential sketch comedy show, which helped jump-start the careers of Jamie Foxx, Jim Carrey and others, and what made it a cultural force in the 1990s. The book includes interviews with the cast and writers, and outlines how the show helped shape national conversations about race.
AWAYLAND: Stories, by Ramona Ausubel. (Riverhead, $16.) The pieces in this collection touch on everything from leaving home to mortality, all with a zany undertow. One story includes a cyclops with a dating profile. As New York Times reviewer Rebecca Lee put it, the stories foreground “families so cracked and mythologically weird that they are more like interesting old ruins.”
HITLER IN LOS ANGELES: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, by Steven J. Ross. (Bloomsbury, $18.) Hitler and Joseph Goebbels set their sights on Los Angeles, planning terrorist attacks and attempts to kill leading Hollywood stars, but a World War I veteran created a spy ring to foil their efforts. Ross’ engaging history turns up some surprising facts, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.
KUDOS, by Rachel Cusk. (Picador, $17.) The final volume in Cusk’s critically acclaimed trilogy, this book finds Faye, a writer and the series’s narrator, newly married and on the literary festival circuit. As with the other novels, the story resists typical plot summary, and highlights the rich monologues Faye elicits from the people she encounters. As Times critic Dwight Garner wrote, Cusk “has that ability, unique to the great performers in every art form, to hold one rapt from the moment she appears.”
THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY: Our Destiny in the Universe, by Michio Kaku. (Anchor, $16.) Kaku, a scientist whose previous books considered the future of physics and the future of the mind, goes long in his new book, imagining everything from settling Mars to how humans might alter themselves to come close to achieving immortality. Kaku gives readers a sense of the science and research being done right now, and where it might lead.
WASHINGTON BLACK, by Esi Edugyan. (Vintage, $16.95.) Edugyan’s terrific novel opens in Barbados in the last days of slavery, and follows a slave who develops a close relationship with his master’s brother. He escapes by hot air balloon, and the pair head to Canada as the story takes on the elements of an adventure narrative. This book was one of the Book Review’s 10 best of 2018.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.