Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

ELASTIC: UNLOCKING YOUR BRAIN’S ABILITY TO EMBRACE CHANGE, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Vintage, $16.) Our capacity to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs, what Mlodinow calls “elastic thinking,” is essential to innovation, creativity and independent thought. He offers an engaging guide to the brain’s power to solve new problems, weaving together scientific research, politics and literature.

BRASS, by Xhenet Aliu. (Random House, $17.) Elsie and Lulu, the mother and daughter whose potent relationship forms the core of this debut novel, are desperate to leave behind their hardscrabble lives. As our reviewer, Julie Buntin, put it, the book “offers a reminder that assumptions — whether about a place, or a person as close to you as your mother — never tell the full story.”

THE WINE LOVER’S DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR, by Anne Fadiman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In her study of her father, the literary critic Clifton Fadiman, the author uses his infatuation with wine to explore the motivations that guide connoisseurship and hedonism. Though Fadiman does not share her father’s ardent love of the drink, her wine-focused vignettes sketch a portrait of their complicated relationship.

MACBETH, by Jo Nesbo. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $16.) In his reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Norwegian crime writer draws out the play’s noir elements, transposing its moral choices and plot to 1970s Glasgow as the city strained under corruption, violence and addiction. Our reviewer, James Shapiro, praised the adaptation, calling the book “a dark but ultimately hopeful ‘Macbeth,’ one suited to our own troubled times, in which ‘the slowness of democracy’ is no match for power-hungry strongmen.”