Among our recommended works of fiction this week is Ali Smith’s “Winter,” an “insubordinate folk tale” that continues her projected quartet tied to the seasons. Two classic novels, Nella Larsen’s “Passing” (1929) and George S. Schuyler’s “Black No More” (1931), have been reissued in time for Black History Month. Ruby Namdar’s “The Ruined House” is an intense novel about Jewish life that won Israel’s most lucrative literary award. And Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s “The World Goes On” is full of the sprawling sentences for which the Hungarian writer has become known. In nonfiction, a wide array of subjects: threats to democracy, ancient crafts, strategy during the Vietnam War, Ezra Pound in confinement and the Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s literary criticism.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

WINTER, by Ali Smith. (Pantheon, $25.95.) The second novel in Smith’s projected seasonal cycle is an insubordinate folk tale, with echoes of the fiction of Iris Murdoch and Angela Carter. In it, four characters gather in a big rambling house and have at each other. Our critic Dwight Garner says that the book’s elastic structure, like that of the previous novel, “Autumn,” “allows Smith the freedom to write as if improvising a bedtime story. The combination of dreaminess and acuity is what gives these books their tang.”

PASSING, by Nella Larsen. (Penguin Classics, $14.) BLACK NO MORE, by George S. Schuyler. (Penguin Classics, $16.) Racial passing is the central concern of both of these influential, if woefully under-read, American classics, which have been reissued in handsome new editions in time for Black History Month. “For their wildly differing approaches, the novels are both curious about what it means to feel, as well as be, truly free, and how freedom and safety might be at odds,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “They are derisive about fantasies of racial purity, black or white. They are unsparing on the madness of racial classification but frank, and very beautiful, on the lure of racial belonging.”

HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. (Crown, $26.) In this “lucid and essential” guide, two political scientists write about the norms that have sustained American democracy, and argue that President Trump has tried to eviscerate more than one of those norms. Our critic Jennifer Szalai, summarizing the book’s circumspect conclusion, writes: “There is no democratic paradise, no easy way out. Democracy, when it functions properly, is hard, grinding work. This message may not be as loud and as lurid as what passes for politics these days, but it might be the one we need to hear.”