Most weeks we hew to a pretty traditional notion of “books” around here: text-based narratives printed on paper and bound between covers, with occasional swerves to accommodate our love of poetry and audiobooks and graphic novels and what have you. But in a world where Bob Dylan can win the Nobel Prize for literature (I approve!), sometimes we have to let our hair down and just bask in the astonishing variety of the book world. This week our recommended titles include two different letter collections — one by the great Ralph Ellison, the other by a group of writers detailing a famous literary scandal as it unfolded in real time — along with a coffee-table book that collects images of the human body, a close look at popular tunes from the American songbook, a meditation on Italian painting, and a poet’s essayistic reflections on the sources and significance of tears. Not a plain old novel or buttoned-up narrative to be found in that group.

Of course if it’s old-fashioned storytelling you want, we do have some traditional forms on offer as well: a travelogue about a religious pilgrimage of sorts, a memoir by the indie rocker Liz Phair, and biographies of the children’s author E. Nesbit, the Broadway star Elaine Stritch and the songwriter Irving Berlin. To put you in the mood for those last two, here’s a clip of Stritch singing the Berlin classic “There’s No Business Like Show Business” at the start of her one-woman stage show. Enjoy.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF RALPH ELLISON, edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner. (Random House, $50.) This collection of Ellison’s correspondence is an essential book that presents the author of “Invisible Man” in all his candor, seriousness, outrage and wit. The letters include thinking about art and ideas, but also about Ellison’s love of hunting, his anxiety over going bald and how to cope with aggressive cats. “This collection has so many incidental pleasures that I nearly always felt lucky to be reading it while the rest of the world had to make do with Twitter,” our critic Dwight Garner writes.

THE DOLPHIN LETTERS, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, edited by Saskia Hamilton. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $50.) In 1970, the poet Robert Lowell took a teaching appointment at Oxford, leaving behind his wife, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, and the couple’s 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. At a party that spring, he encountered the heiress and Anglo-Irish writer Caroline Blackwood. He moved into Blackwood’s house that night, and later had a child with her. He then wrote a new book drawing on the situation. This collection of correspondence between Lowell, Hardwick and their friends brings this famous literary scandal to life. The letters are “darkly compelling” and “uneasy, thrilling company,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, because they get to elemental questions about why people do what they do.