DEATH IN MUD LICK: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic, by Eric Eyre. (Scribner, $28.) Eyre, a West Virginia newspaper reporter who won a Pulitzer in 2017 for his writing about the opioid crisis, here expands those articles into a narrative about the devastations that addiction has visited on his state, and his own role in bringing them to light. Reviewing it, our critic Dwight Garner says that Eyre “writes with candor and gravity; a tensile rod of human decency braces every paragraph.” The book, he adds, is “meat and potatoes journalism in a light, sensible broth. … It’s the work of an author who understands that objectivity is not the same as bland neutrality. I expect it will be taught to aspiring reporters for many years to come.”

NOTES FROM AN APOCALYPSE: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, by Mark O’Connell. (Doubleday, $27.95.) In a timely tour of preparing for the worst, O’Connell visited tricked-out bunkers, wilderness reserves, space-colonizing conferences and other places where people are getting ready for the end of the world as we know it. Our critic Jennifer Szalai calls the book “a funny, self-deprecating inquiry,” and notes that “some of the stops on this travelogue are so spectacularly scenic that I found myself envious, and not a little bit suspicious: Here was someone who had figured out a way to tour the world by writing about the end of it.”

AMERICAN CONSERVATISM: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, edited by Andrew J. Bacevich. (Library of America, $29.95.) This collection shows how wide-ranging the conservative tradition in the United States actually is, with familiar voices like William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan, but also surprises like Zora Neale Hurston and Reinhold Niebuhr. George Will, reviewing it, calls the anthology “a nourishing cafeteria of writers, many of them justly forgotten but still interesting because they once were interesting. And Bacevich’s book would be entirely justified by his most inspired selection, Joan Didion’s 1972 stiletto of an essay ‘The Women’s Movement,’ which begins, ‘To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone “oppressed” to break them.’”

THESE FEVERED DAYS: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, by Martha Ackmann. (Norton, $26.95.) Ackmann taught a seminar on Dickinson to Mount Holyoke College students for nearly two decades; in this painstakingly researched homage, she zeroes in on key episodes in the poet’s life, evoking each with a storyteller’s flair. “I quickly came to treasure Ackmann’s ample descriptions, her deep knowledge of the poet’s milieu,” Megan Marshall writes in her review. “In recent years we’ve been blessed — or tormented, depending on your view — with two Emily Dickinson biopics of dubious historical fidelity, and the flagrantly fictionalized TV series ‘Dickinson.’ ‘These Fevered Days’ is the perfect antidote: thoroughly researched, and yet, with Ackmann’s energetic storytelling, alive.”

MY METEORITE: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, by Harry Dodge. (Penguin, paper, $18.) Dodge, a West Coast artist partial to both literary theory and pop culture, brings both together in his heady first book, a memoir that ditches chronology for a structure highlighting the deeper meanings he believes underlie his life’s myriad small coincidences. “Dodge intimates that through such coincidences we can spy the divine,” our reviewer, Ismail Muhammad, writes. “Though he is certain that ‘collisions explain everything,’ he also pines for ‘pattern, which I understand to be evidentiary of cosmological purposiveness (meaning itself).’ The thing is, for Dodge both are true: The world unfolds in a random manner, and this randomness is laden with meaning.”