For various reasons — we’re fighting colds, Times Square is stumbling through the usual post-holiday blahs, our colleagues in the Travel section just unveiled their latest sumptuous list of 52 places to visit — we’ve got globe-trotting on the mind this week. If you do too, might we recommend some short stories from Argentina? Or a new bayou murder mystery from James Lee Burke? A novel about Somali immigrants in Norway, or a collection of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s precise character studies of expats and emigrants? You’ll find all of those below, along with Paul Collier’s nonfiction book about retaining a sense of community in a globalized world. Closer to home, we offer a couple of food memoirs, and a natural history of the domestic biome that may have you urgently planning your next vacation to a technologically engineered cleanroom facility with a protective suit and a book. The cleanroom would be a mistake, our review makes clear. But a book is always a good idea.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

MOUTHFUL OF BIRDS: Stories, by Samanta Schweblin. Translated by Megan McDowell. (Riverhead, $26.) This collection by the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, among the most acclaimed Spanish-language writers of her generation, has the surrealist echoes of her contemporaries Kelly Link and Jesse Ball. “But, to me, her true ancestor could only be David Lynch; her tales are woven out of dread, doubles and confident loose ends,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Her stories are obsessed with notions of purity and danger; with the ways people can be deformed, very early on, in the name of tenderness, teaching and care.”

THE NEW IBERIA BLUES, by James Lee Burke. (Simon & Schuster, $27.99.) In the latest Dave Robicheaux mystery, Burke’s lawman hero contends with multiple visitors to his Louisiana bayou parish: a murderer fleeing prison; a Hollywood director returning to his roots for a movie; a woman nailed to a wooden cross that washes up from the bay. It’s brutal and chaotic, but engrossing. “Does anyone really read Burke expecting a coherent narrative? We’re hanging on for Robicheaux’s pensées,” Marilyn Stasio writes in her crime column. “We’re keeping an eye out for vivid characters. … Maybe most of all, we’re waiting for those angry outbursts when Robicheaux lets it rip.”

NORTH OF DAWN, by Nuruddin Farah. (Riverhead, $27.) The war between the middle-aged Somali couple in Farah’s new novel, set in middle-class Norway, is a proxy for the global clash between fundamentalism and secularism. “In the hands of a younger, brasher novelist, we might expect high drama, but here, instead, is a nuanced, quietly devastating family soap opera,” our reviewer, Melanie Finn, writes. Farah “uses the intimate as allegory for the national. If we cannot understand why a family falls apart, then neither can we understand why a nation does — a truth those of us weary from holiday-dinner-table political arguments may appreciate.”