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A very different kind of partnership is immortalized in “Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America,” a haunting memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo. The book is centered on the troubled relationship between the author and his father, although it roams freely in many other directions. Gregory Pardlo Sr. was an air traffic controller and labor organizer who lost his job in 1981 when 13,000 controllers went on strike and President Reagan fired more than 11,000 of them. The younger Gregory isn’t simplistic enough to blame all of his family’s problems on this, but it was definitely a giant head start.

He writes of how his father’s stubborn nature, profligacy and addiction destroyed the family’s stability. He also writes of his own addiction issues, and the overlap between father’s life and son’s. Simple description does not do Pardlo’s story justice; only his own sublime words can achieve that. “My father’s example is the storm on the horizon I don’t want to lose sight of and can’t let myself get close to,” he writes. “A lifetime of calibrating these perils of proximity gives me credentials in a kind of metaphysical math, a telemetry of spiritual disaster.”

Diving Into History

The travels through time and geography in “Air Traffic” take us at one point to Charleston, S.C., which is the subject of a fascinating and important new historical study. “Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy,” by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, examines Charleston as the capital of slavery in the United States and, therefore, the place where the ways slavery is remembered matter most. This book examines rival sets of memories: from a segregated tourism industry, which not long ago gave out different sets of information to different people, to today’s fights over Civil War monuments.

For sheer drama on the water, it’s hard to beat the tragedy recounted in Rachel Slade’s “Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm and the Sinking of El Faro.” Slade has pieced together and embroidered the mystery of a container ship’s 2015 disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle. She has added high drama to dialogue obtained from the ship’s data recorder, turning the story into a fast-moving cinematic adventure. But for all of the drama, the worst scares are in the epilogue. This sinking was no simple accident. According to Slade, safety regulations were ignored. Shipping company executives were inept. Lack of funding has reduced the accuracy of weather forecasts, the degree of Coast Guard preparedness and the extent to which container ships are inspected. The death toll was 33.

Newcomers of Note

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s superbly witty debut, the story collection “Heads of the Colored People,” takes its title from the work of a 19th-century abolitionist. As the author recently told The Times, she once thought of becoming a stand-up comic. The topics she takes on are often deadly serious (one is about an impending suicide), but every story flashes grim humor. She is also a brutally sharp observer. The epistolary story “Belles Lettres” could have been written with a scalpel.

A few other books by new writers command attention. Tommy Orange’s “There There” is a groundbreaking novel about Native Americans who are city dwellers. But it’s not the Oakland, Calif., setting that leaps out. It’s Orange’s extraordinary ability to invest a series of interlocking character sketches with the troubled history of his displaced people. Half-white and “an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma” (as one of the book’s characters is), Orange has written a tense, prismatic book with inexorable momentum. It all heads toward an annual Oakland powwow that confuses real and fake Americana more wrenchingly than any book since “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.”

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The debut novelist Nafkote Tamirat manages to find antic possibilities in “The Parking Lot Attendant,” the story of how a charismatic Ethiopian hustler in Boston, who runs a lot more than a parking lot, works his magic on a trusting teenage girl. The girl and her father begin the book as the least popular members of a colony on a desert island, and part of the fun is wondering how they got there. Tamirat’s calmly assured voice grounds her story in refreshing understatement.