Fall fiction is here and ready to entertain you, as new novels by Nicole Krauss, Salman Rushdie and Nathan Englander can attest. In nonfiction, enhance your viewing of Ken Burns’s “Vietnam War” with James Reston Jr.’s “A Rift in the Earth,” the story of the controversy over Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial. Two illuminating memoirs — one by a candidate, one by a journalist — will plunge you back into the thick of the 2016 election, but if that history is still a little too close for comfort, you can always take refuge in Scaachi Koul’s irreverent essay collection, “One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter.”

Radhika Jones

Editorial Director, Books

WHAT HAPPENED, by Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Hillary Clinton tells the story of what it was like to run for president of the United States as the female nominee of a major party, a first in American history. “It is a post-mortem,” our critic Jennifer Senior writes of Clinton’s memoir, “in which she is both coroner and corpse. It is also a “candid and blackly funny account of her mood in the direct aftermath of losing to Donald J. Trump,” a “feminist manifesto” and a “score-settling jubilee.”

LINER NOTES: On Parents & Children, Exes & Excess, Death & Decay, & a Few of My Other Favorite Things, by Loudon Wainwright III. (Blue Rider Press, $27.) The folk singer Loudon Wainwright III has written some excellent songs, and his musical family tree has many branches. He was married to Kate McGarrigle, had a long relationship with Suzzy Roche, and his children include Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche. “Like the best songs of the Wainwright-McGarrigle-Roche clan,” our critic Dwight Garner writes, “this straightforward book makes your heart wobble on its axis. And it sends you back to the songs.”

DRAFT NO. 4: On the Writing Process, by John McPhee. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25.) In this collection of writing advice, John McPhee, the longtime New Yorker staff writer and professor at Princeton, offers commentary on his greatest hits, a little back story, a little affectionate gossip. “He can lapse into occasional hokiness,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “But generally his advice is in the service of making the text as sturdy, useful and beautiful as possible.”