That tremor you felt last week was the dropping of a new John Green novel, “Turtles All the Way Down,” his first since “The Fault in Our Stars” and a seismic event not just in young people’s literature but in all people’s literature. The other tremor you felt was the dropping of a new Ron Chernow biography, “Grant,” the story of the general turned president tasked with the ultimate political challenge, uniting a post-civil-war society. We recommend them both — just don’t drop Chernow’s actual book; at 1,074 pages, it might break something.

Radhika JonesEditorial Director, Books

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK, Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney. (New York Review Books, $19.95.) “To move one’s way through Hardwick’s essays is to bump into brightness on nearly every page,” writes our critic Dwight Garner about this volume of writings by one of the co-founders of the New York Review of Books and a landmark American critic. Hardwick, who died in 2007, “had fresh eyes, quick wits, good feelers and was murderously well-read.”

TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN, by John Green. (Dutton, $19.99.) Green’s new novel, his first since the mega-best-selling “The Fault in Our Stars,” is “by far his most difficult to read,” writes our critic Jennifer Senior. “It’s also his most astonishing.” The story of Aza, a 16-year-old who suffers from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, delves into familiar Green themes of love and suffering, working toward an ending that Senior describes as “so surprising and moving and true that I became completely unstrung.”

GRANT, by Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow gives us a Grant for our time, comprehensively recounting not only the victories of the Civil War general but also the challenges of a president who fought against white supremacy groups like the Ku Klux Klan and championed the right of eligible citizens to exercise the vote. “For all its scholarly and literary strengths,” writes former President Bill Clinton, “this book’s greatest service is to remind us of Grant’s significant achievements at the end of the war and after, which have too long been overlooked and are too important today to be left in the dark.”