Murder! Espionage! Fashion! We’ve got a fun grab-bag of books this week, from true crime (“The Trial of Lizzie Borden”) to memoir (Isaac Mizrahi’s “I.M.,” Aatish Taseer’s “The Twice-Born”) to three different takes on groundbreaking women: an anthology of Andrea Dworkin’s feminist writings, a group study of five female novelists and a biography of the woman who organized a spy ring for the French Resistance. In fiction, Helen Oyeyemi has a new novel, and we recommend story collections from David Means and Christos Ikonomou alongside a debut novel from Novuyo Rosa Tshuma that explores Zimbabwe’s troubled history. Finally, something from one of our own: The Times’s top newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, has written a spirited examination of truth, journalism and the First Amendment as it plays out in his job and in the culture at large. That book, “Truth in Our Times,” is a good bet for Times readers as much as Times employees, and for anyone who cares about the future of a free press.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

THE TRIAL OF LIZZIE BORDEN: A True Story, by Cara Robertson. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) Lizzie Borden, accused of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in 1892, has gone down in history as villain, victim, punch line and the media sensation of the Gilded Age. This new book about the case was nearly 20 years in the making, and it is “enthralling,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Robertson does not work for the prosecution or the defense. She marshals us to no conclusion. She only reopens the case and presents the evidence afresh, all those alluring details out of an Agatha Christie novel.”

LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, by Andrea Dworkin. Edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder (Semiotext(e), $17.95.) Andrea Dworkin, who died in 2005, at 58, was determined to show how women could never be free as long as they lived in a world that was structured by men’s ambitions, needs and desires. This new anthology collects pieces of her essays, novels and previously unpublished works. “A new generation of feminists have reclaimed her,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, “seeing in Dworkin’s incandescent rage a source of illumination, even as they bristle at some of her specific views. This new anthology of her work, shows that the caricature of her as a simplistic man-hater, a termagant in overalls, could only be sustained by not reading what she actually wrote.”

GINGERBREAD, by Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $27.) For her new novel — a meditation on family and what it means to be part of a community — Oyeyemi has taken old fairy tales, seasoned them with 20th-century history and pop-culture references, and frosted them with whimsical detail. “Her sentences are like grabbing onto the tail of a vibrant, living creature without knowing what you’ll find at the other end,” Eowyn Ivey writes in her review. The novel is “jarring, funny, surprising, unsettling, disorienting and rewarding. It requires the reader to be quick-footed and alert. And by the end, it is clear what has grounded the story from the start — the tender and troubling humanity of its characters.”