With her fifth novel, The Burning Girl (Norton), Claire Messud forgoes clever satire for elegant sympathy. Slim but impactful, her narrative follows the diverging paths of a pair of teenage girls in a small town, torn apart by men, drugs, and, most polarizing of all, fantasy. “If you have to imagine,” asks the troubled Cassie, “why imagine something bad?” The Burning Girl asks how well we can ever know our closest confidants and answers its own question with every refined page.

V.F. writer Tom Sancton’s juicy The Bettencourt Affair (Dutton) is the very picture of un grand scandale about the world’s richest woman. First novels as rich and enchanting as Augustus Rose’s The Readymade Thief(Viking) don’t come around too often, and when they do, they rarely combine secret societies, teenage runaways, and Marcel Duchamp. Acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Riverhead) is a blaze of identity, family, nationalism, and Sophocles’ Antigone. V.F.contributing editor Kurt Andersen’s erudite Fantasyland (Random House) is a study of magical thinking and mania throughout American history. Meanwhile, fantasy becomes reality in NBC reporter Katy Tur’sTrump-trailing Unbelievable (Dey Street).

Back in a flash: Sam Stephenson takes a wide-angle view of a celebrated photo-essayist in Gene Smith’s Sink (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Only connect with Bill Goldstein as he peers through a literary lens at The World Broke in Two (Henry Holt). And what’s black and white and flashy all over? Famed photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont’s New York City Up and Down (Glitterati).

CAMPUS DRAMAS

It’s all cafeteria trays and dormitory IDs until it isn’t. Vanity Fair’s Schools for Scandal (Simon & Schuster), edited by Graydon Carter, offers not just an inside peek but a multifaceted examination of the dramas that unfold on America’s most elite campuses. From the unraveling of allegations at big-name institutions (Duke University, University of Virginia) to art thefts at Transylvania University, Schools for Scandal presents a syllabus’s worth of riveting journalism. As V.F.editor-at-large Cullen Murphy writes in the book’s introduction, schools are “a point of intersection for just about every social phenomenon on the planet”; come for the Trump University filleting, stay for John Kerry playing “boodleball,” a “violent soccer-hockey hybrid,” in Yale’s Skull and Bones Tomb.

George Giusti’s Kromekote: Salesmaker for the World of Music, from The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (Abrams), by Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio. Photographs from the George Giusti Collection/Cary Graphic Arts Collection/Rochester Institute Of Technology/permission of Robert Giusti (Kromekote).

IN SHORT

Judith Newman reveals the tender side of tech in To Siri with Love(Harper). Literary biographer James Atlas is a writer’s writer’s writer in The Shadow in the Garden (Pantheon). Salman Rushdie signs a magical lease on The Golden House (Random House). Yve-Alain Bois and Ben Eastham’s Ed Ruscha (Rizzoli) puts us in a typographical trance. Jonathan Dee’s The Locals (Random House) shrinks class warfare down to size. Kristen Iskandrian explores maternal bonds in Motherest (Twelve). Adorn your life with all things Alice Temperley (Rizzoli). Mumble a prayer for Stephen Colbert in Stephen Colbert’s Midnight Confessions(Simon & Schuster). Absorb Danielle Allen’s account of an abbreviated life, just Cuz (Liveright). Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling(Riverhead) captures a compelling young heroine. Three eccentric socialites buttress Judith Mackrell’s The Unfinished Palazzo (Thames & Hudson). The Red-Haired Woman (Knopf) takes us outside Istanbul and inside the mind of Orhan Pamuk. Culinary icon Alice Waters goes farm-to-bookshelf with Coming to My Senses (Clarkson Potter). It’s racial Utopia for two but not forever in Danzy Senna’s New People(Riverhead). Heather Harpham finds Happiness (Henry Holt) when her life is rocked. Emily Culliton dazzles in The Misfortune of Marion Palm(Knopf). William Taubman leaves his mark on Gorbachev (Norton). Mike Perry manufactures a hipster maze in The Broad City Coloring Book(Laurence King). Russell Westbrook (Rizzoli) dares us not to sweat his style. Daniel Handler deftly details All the Dirty Parts (Bloomsbury). Loudon Wainwright III’s Liner Notes (Blue Rider) delves into death, decay, and other delights.