SEDUCTION: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, by Karina Longworth. (Custom House/Morrow, $29.99.) Longworth puts Hughes, the women he romanced and discarded, and the whole flesh-peddling movie-biz circus in a new and timely perspective. Lisa Schwarzbaum, reviewing it with a handful of other show-business books, says this one is “guaranteed to engross anybody with any interest at all in Hollywood, in movies, in #MeToo and in the never-ending story of men with power and women without.”

HENRY TAYLOR: The Only Portrait I Ever Painted of My Momma Was Stolen, by Sarah Lewis, Charles Gaines, Zadie Smith and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. (Rizzoli/Electa and Blum & Poe, $65.) Taylor shows “black history the way many black people actually experience it,” Smith writes. Our reviewer, Nicole Herrington, notes that the book’s most powerful images include “portraits of individuals from all walks of life: his relatives, random strangers he met near his loft studio in downtown Los Angeles, Olympic athletes, Jay-Z. Over all, Taylor’s subjects ‘reveal a kind of truth, a story that has to be told,’ as the artist Charles Gaines says in an extensive interview with Taylor published in the book.”

BING CROSBY: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946, by Gary Giddins. (Little, Brown, $40.) This second volume of a projected multivolume biography takes the singer through the peak years of his popularity, a star of recordings, radio and movies. Giddins guides readers through a mountain of material, “in brisk, lucid prose, as smoothly controlled as a Crosby performance,” James Gavin writes in his review, which credits Crosby as the popular singer “who, more than any other vocalist, … freed that art from its turn-of-the-century stiffness and transformed it into conversation. Drawing on black influences, he made pop songs swing, while treating a new invention, the microphone, as if it were a friend’s ear.”

IN BYRON’S WAKE: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, by Miranda Seymour. (Pegasus, $35.) A dual biography that traces the poet’s tangled legacy and its influence on the lives of his widow and their daughter, who made a name for herself as a mathematician and astronomer. “Seymour is cleareyed but gentle,” Stacy Schiff writes, reviewing the book. “For the most part she steps aside and lets these two forces of nature speak for their eloquent selves. The result is a rich narrative.”

HOW LONG ’TIL BLACK FUTURE MONTH? by N.K. Jemisin. (Orbit, $26.) In often-dazzling stories that teem with impostors, parasites and hybrids, the Hugo and Nebula-winning author puts a fresh spin on old-fashioned sci-fi story lines. Our reviewer, Laura Miller, notes that the collection features many “uncanny moments in which the human integrates with what feels profoundly inhuman. … Jemisin does creepy so well, it’s enough to make you wish she’d try a straight-up horror novel — another genre that could really use more black writers.”

BERLIN, by Jason Lutes. (Drawn + Quarterly, $49.95.) Lutes spent 22 years putting together this panoramic graphic novel of 1920s Berlin. It involves a cast of dozens — journalists and junkmen, artists and runaways, all capturing different aspects of a society whose democratic institutions are slowly falling away. “The magic in ‘Berlin’ is in the way Lutes conjures, out of old newspapers and photographs, a city so remote from him in space and time,” Ed Park writes in his Graphic Content column. “Lutes is incapable of drawing a lazy panel. His scrupulous style makes everything from the font of a store sign to a parlor wallpaper pattern worthy of study.”

BRIDGET RILEY: The Complete Paintings, edited by Robert Kudielka with Alexandra Tommasini and Natalia Naish. (Thames & Hudson, $700.) In five volumes, this meticulous catalog presents over 600 works in a steady chronological march. “One does not read ‘Bridget Riley’ so much as experience it like a retrospective exhibition,” Mark Guiducci writes in his review, “in a progression that is as linear as the paintings for which she is best known: from her first paintings, copies of the pointillist Seurat, to studious geometric canvases to later mind-bending visual experiences that wink at the barriers of consciousness.”