Now that Election Day is behind us — like an exorcism, maybe: “Get behind us, midterms!” — the natural question is what it all will mean. Books can help with that. (Books can help with everything.) Our recommended titles this week offer context for some of the country’s most pressing political issues across a range of perspectives and genres. In “Melting Pot or Civil War?,” Reihan Salam tries to find middle ground on immigration. In “She Wants It,” the TV writer Jill Soloway provides a personal take on the politics of gender and transgender identity. In “American Dialogue,” the historian Joseph Ellis asks what the founders would make of our current divisions. Jane Sharon De Hart’s “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” traces the Supreme Court justice’s route to becoming a feminist icon. Kiese Laymon’s excellent memoir, “Heavy,” and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s excellent story collection, “Friday Black,” both unfold against a backdrop of national dysfunction and racist violence. And Max Boot explains why he has turned away from his longtime home in the Republican Party.

Or maybe you prefer to forget about politics for a while. Books can help with that too: We bring you Lee Child’s latest thriller, Kathryn Harrison’s latest memoir, a biography of Nietzsche and two books (a memoir and a story collection) from the unjustly neglected 20th-century writer Lucia Berlin, who is finally and happily starting to get her due.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

EVENING IN PARADISE: More Stories, by Lucia Berlin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) WELCOME HOME: A Memoir With Selected Photographs and Letters, by Lucia Berlin. Edited and with a foreword by Jeff Berlin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The revival of the work of Lucia Berlin (1936-2004), which began in earnest with “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” an important selection of her stories that appeared in 2015, continues with another collection of stories along with and uncompleted memoir and some personal correspondence. “One thing that makes Berlin so valuable is her gift for evoking the sweetness and earnestness of young women who fall in love,” our critic Dwight Garner writes, “and then catching them at that moment when things begin to turn, when the trees of their being are forced to grow bark.”

I AM DYNAMITE! A Life of Nietzsche, by Sue Prideaux. (Tim Duggan Books, $30.) In this biography, Nietzsche steps out of the mists of obfuscation and rumor. Prideaux draws her subject into focus by examining the events in his life, his personal writing and his published work. “To see Nietzsche, it seems helpful to have binocular vision that can accommodate the sublime and the ridiculous. His was a life of prodigious work and self-sacrifice but also profound blundering,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Freud said that of all men only Nietzsche truly knew himself, and his letters can be wildly funny and full of comic set pieces. Prideaux relishes this side of him.”