In a pandemic, apparently some people write “King Lear.” Me, I’m grateful just to read it. If you find yourself stuck in house arrest like Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov in “A Gentleman in Moscow” — and able to concentrate on something besides the news or your immediate mortal peril — you may want to stock up on books as well as canned beans. This week we recommend a story collection and four novels, including one by the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay that was considered too edgy to publish during his lifetime. In nonfiction there’s a biography of the supremely unsettling novelist Robert Stone, two memoirs (one by a writer who suddenly stopped writing, and one about an extended Soviet family), as well as a weighty analysis of capitalism and politics by the best-selling economist Thomas Piketty. Download that to your e-reader, and you’ll have something to chew on for the next 18 months.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

CHILD OF LIGHT: A Biography of Robert Stone, by Madison Smartt Bell. (Doubleday, $35.) In his best novels, like “Dog Soldiers” and “A Flag for Sunrise,” Robert Stone, who died in 2015 at 77, drew from a deeper well than most of his contemporaries. A simmering paranoia bubbles under the surface of his fiction, a paranoia he had a sense of humor about. Our critic Dwight Garner calls this new biography by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell “sensitive and thorough,” and says that reading it, “Stone’s distrust begins to make sense. He was not inherently a wild man, but he attracted wildness. It came to him, as if he were coaxing it out of the soil. He fed off the destructive energy.”

YOUNG HEROES OF THE SOVIET UNION: A Memoir and a Reckoning, by Alex Halberstadt. (Random House, $28.) Halberstadt had planned to write a book about his paternal grandfather, Vassily, who worked in a notorious Soviet prison for several years before becoming one of Stalin’s bodyguards. Instead, the author, who emigrated to the United States with his mother and her parents in 1980, when he was 10, has produced a memoir about not just Vassily but his wider family and the country where he was born. The result is “a loving and mournful account that’s also skeptical, surprising and often very funny,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, full of “confident, precisely drawn imagery that will make you remember what Halberstadt describes in his own unforgettable terms.”

MY DARK VANESSA, by Kate Elizabeth Russell. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99.) In this unsettling debut novel, Vanessa Wye, now an adult — and a classic unreliable narrator — looks back at the sexual relationship with her English teacher that began when she was 15, superimposing a teenage girl’s love story onto a creepy tale of abuse. “The novel flickers between the horror of the situation and the romantic overlay with the stylized dizziness of a disco ball,” Katie Roiphe writes in her review. “The reader struggles, along with Vanessa, to make sense of what is happening, to interpolate, to see the truth, with so many false accounts, so many delusions, so many efforts to neaten or prettify. … One of the more radical aspects of the novel is that it maintains its ambiguities, it refuses to give up entirely on the idea that there was love somewhere in this encounter, along with other sicker, darker things.”