There’s a saying in journalism (and in other endeavors, with minor variations) that twice is a coincidence, three times is a trend. If that’s true, we have a bunch of coincidences for you this week. There are two Supreme Court biographies: Evan Thomas’s “First,” about Sandra Day O’Connor, and Joan Biskupic’s “The Chief,” about John Roberts. There are two spy books: the novel “American Spy” and the political history “Spies of No Country.” Two memoirs, by Carolyn Forché and Mitchell S. Jackson. And weirdly — which is to say, coincidentally — two books with the word “betrayal” in the subtitle. The lesson here may only be that eclecticism likes company. And that sounds like a trend.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

LOT: Stories, by Bryan Washington. (Riverhead, $25.) The subtle, dynamic and flexible stories in this debut collection play out across Houston’s sprawling and multiethnic neighborhoods. About half of the stories are about a single family, and in particular about the coming-of-age of a teenager, the son of a black mother and a Latino father. “The promise Washington displays is real and large,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. He is “an alert and often comic observer of the world.”

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, by Carolyn Forché. (Penguin Press, $28.) In 1977, someone Carolyn Forché had never met arrived at the poet’s door in California and convinced her to travel to El Salvador to document the perilous political turmoil there. Forché recounts the ensuing experience, and its lasting effect on her life and work, in this new memoir. “Once Forché’s story gathers momentum, it’s hard to let the narrative go,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “The shape of her memoir hews closely to what she herself saw and heard — and how, out of the horror, she began to discern what she needed to do.”

FIRST: Sandra Day O’Connor, by Evan Thomas. (Random House, $32.) O’Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, was as practical, fearless and independent-minded off the bench as she was on it; in this intimate and admiring portrait, Thomas, a veteran journalist and biographer, expertly navigates both her pathbreaking career and fulfilling domestic life. Jeffrey Toobin, reviewing it, calls the book “fascinating and revelatory,” and concludes that “Thomas’s book is not just a biography of a remarkable woman, but an elegy for a worldview that, in law as well as politics, has disappeared from the nation’s main stages.”