We start this week’s list of recommendations with the rare timely book that begins in an ancient era: Mary Beard’s “Women & Power: A Manifesto.” Beard opens her slender but powerful book by writing: “I want to start very near the beginning of the tradition of Western literature, and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up.’ ” The scene she is talking about takes place in the “Odyssey.” And how’s this for timing? Our list this week also includes a new translation of Homer’s epic by Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the work into English. Among the other books also included below: a new history of hoaxes, a posthumous collection of essays by Oliver Sacks and an astronaut’s memoir of time spent in space.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

WOMEN & POWER: A Manifesto, by Mary Beard. (Liveright, $15.95.) In her pocket-size new book, the Cambridge classicist writes about the ways in which women have been regarded as interlopers in public life from the time of Aristotle up to the present day. Our critic Parul Sehgal calls the book “sparkling and forceful” and “a straight shot of adrenaline, animated less by lament than impatience and quick wit.”

RADIO FREE VERMONT: A Fable of Resistance, by Bill McKibben. (Blue Rider Press, $22.) McKibben, a Vermonter and one of the best-known environmentalists of our age, turns to satire in this novel about an old-school radio host who stumbles into leading a secessionist movement. Our critic Jennifer Senior writes that McKibben is a proposing a thought experiment, “daring the reader to ponder the virtues of smallness in an age of military and corporate gigantism.”

BUNK: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, by Kevin Young. (Graywolf, $30.) Young’s enthralling, essential history is unapologetically subjective — and timely. Again and again, he plumbs the undercurrents of a hoax to discover fearfulness and racism lurking inside.