Urwand’s decade of archival research uncovers rampant cinematic censorship, but it also brings to light some more horrifying history: MGM not only helped fund Nazi weaponry, but its top Germany executive divorced his Jewish wife at the Propaganda Ministry’s request shortly before she wound up in a concentration camp.

Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II

Farah Jasmine Smith

September 10 (Basic Books)

Columbia University professor Farah Jasmine Griffin spotlights the achievements of three young, artistically brave black women who lived in Harlem during the Second World War and laid the framework for the Civil Rights movement: writer Ann Petry, dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus, and musician and bebop pioneer Mary Lou Williams. According to Publishers Weekly, the book marks “a giant step to securing the place all three subjects merit in American cultural history.”

Nine Inches

Tom Perrotta

September 10 (St. Martin's)

Tom Perrotta returns with his first collection of short fiction since 1994’s Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, which eschewed the easy wisecracks about disco and Charlie’s Angels in favor of intimate, frank looks at the milestones of small-town youth.

Publishers Weekly deemed Bad Haircut “a convincing portrait of a time of life, illuminating all the profound cruelty and tenderness of adolescence,” so take it as a good sign that Nine Inches, similarly, finds depth in the seemingly mundane: an instant, surprising spark of connection between an elderly woman and a benched high-school football player; a fleeting romance between two teachers.

Sister Mother Husband Dog etc.

Delia Ephron

September 17 (Blue Rider)

The Most of Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron

October 29 (Knopf)

When multi-talented writer Nora Ephron died last year, her contemporaries and collaborators—from Lena Dunham to Tom Hanks and Billy Crystal—immediately and ardently remembered in the fondest of ways. The Most of Nora Ephron, a collection of her best and most famous writings, places her final work, the play Lucky Guy, alongside the text of her funny, ferocious commencement address at Wellesley and the famous deli scene from When Harry Met Sally, among others.

Delia Ephron’s latest compilation of stories and essays, meanwhile, deals largely with the process of mourning her sister Nora. But the similarly well-rounded other Ephron, also an author and screenwriter, additionally includes humorous musings on their projects together, their relationships with their other two sisters, and why every news station’s daily weather report should be replaced once and for all with a how-to-wear-your-hair-today report.

Bleeding Edge

Thomas Pynchon

September 17 (Penguin)

Thomas Pynchon’s “technothriller” takes place in his own birthplace—Long Island—and follows single mom and small-time fraud investigator Maxine Turnow as she misadventures through the world of post-dotcom-boom, pre-9/11 New York. When she starts sniffing around the finances of a computer-security firm, though, people start dying—and suddenly Maxine finds herself in a weird web of deception, tangled up with hackers, coders, the Russian mob, and a “professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave.”