THE IDEA FACTORY: BELL LABS AND THE GREAT AGE OF AMERICAN INNOVATION by Jon Gertner (Penguin Press). From the 1920s through the ’80s Bell Labs — the research and development wing of AT&T — was the most innovative scientific organization in the world, pioneering the development of the transistor, the laser and digital communications. In this riveting new book Mr. Gertner not only gives us keenly observed portraits of the individual scientists behind such transformative products but also examines the reasons Bell Labs became such an incubator of talent — and the place, for several decades, where the future was invented.

THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE by Ayana Mathis (Alfred A. Knopf). This extraordinarily powerful debut novel chronicles the many sorrows visited upon one Hattie Shepherd, a woman who left the Jim Crow South in the 1920s to start a new life in Philadelphia, and who at 16 lost her twin babies to pneumonia. That loss hardens Hattie’s heart, and she raises nine more children with stoic determination and not a whole lot of warmth — an emotional legacy that will shape the remainder of their lives. Writing with authority and psychological precision, Ms. Mathis endows Hattie’s life with an epic dimension — much as Toni Morrison has done with so many of her characters — while at the same time making her daily life thoroughly palpable and real.

THE REVOLUTION WAS TELEVISED: THE COPS, CROOKS, SLINGERS AND SLAYERS WHO CHANGED TV DRAMA FOREVER by Alan Sepinwall. In this engaging new book the television critic for hitfix.com provides a smart, observant look at 12 “great millennial dramas” — including “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “24,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” — that transformed the TV landscape and moved the small screen out from under the shadow of the movies. Mixing critical analysis and interviews with the creators of these shows, the book is a spirited and thoughtful cultural history that possesses all the immediacy and detailed observation of Mr. Sepinwall’s popular blog, What’s Alan Watching?

EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY: A LIFE OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE by D. T. Max (Viking). This revealing biography of Wallace — who committed suicide in 2008 at 46 — traces the connections between his life and art, mapping the sources of his philosophical vision, while chronicling the heartbreaking struggle he waged throughout his adult life with severe depression. It gives the reader a sympathetic portrait of the artist as a young man: conflicted, self-conscious and, like many of his characters, yearning for connection yet stymied by the whirring of his brain and the discontinuities of an America reeling from information overload.