MACHIAVELLI: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear, by Patrick Boucheron. Translated by Willard Wood. (Other Press, $14.99.) Boucheron’s energetic little book, which started out as a series of talks for French public radio in 2016, offers a knowing guide to Machiavelli’s life and work. He presents his subject as “an inveterate dramatist and irrepressible trickster,” according to our critic Jennifer Szalai: “It’s not so much the content of ‘The Prince’ as its approach, with its ‘theatrical energy’ and ‘sure and rapid pace,’ that offers a way to think about politics not as static and immutable but as stubbornly contingent. Cultivating republican institutions and the rule of law requires certain techniques; sheer political survival requires others.”

SEDUCTION: A History From the Enlightenment to the Present, by Clement Knox. (Pegasus, $28.95.) Like an R-rated version of “A Christmas Carol,” Knox’s history whisks readers away to meet enticers past, from Casanova to the flappers of the 1920s, showing how the art of seduction has influenced politics and power, literature and social movements. It turns out we have long been conflicted about this art: Is it villainy or sexual liberation? Knox also discusses the book on a recent episode of the Book Review’s podcast.

THE CONVERT, by Stefan Hertmans. Translated by David McKay. (Pantheon, $27.95.) In both “The Convert” and his previous novel, the highly praised “War and Turpentine,” the Belgian novelist Stefan Hertmans habitually treats the reader to his process. Weaving research and personal travel with his fiction writer’s historical imagination, in “The Convert” he reconstructs the life of a medieval Frenchwoman, Sarah Hamoutal Todros (née Vigdis Adelais Gudbrandr), who defied her aristocratic Christian family to marry a Jewish yeshiva student from another town. Our reviewer Valerie Martin writes that this novel is “an imaginative flight, full of darkness and light, lively characters, life-altering conflicts, violence and kindness, birth, death and, oddly, a lot of snakes.”

INDELICACY, by Amina Cain. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) An aspiring writer marries a man she meets while mopping the floor at the museum where she works. He seems like the ticket to the life she wants — and yet. “You’re a little bit jealous of this woman until you realize how miserable she is,” writes Elisabeth Egan, who chose Cain’s novel for Group Text, the Book Review’s monthly column for readers and book clubs. “She has exactly what she thought she wanted, but the next phase of her life unfolds hypnotically as ‘Indelicacy’ morphs from a modern ‘Pygmalion’ into a fable infused with an old-fashioned moral: Be careful what you wish for.” Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic.

RETURN TO ROMANCE! The Strange Love Stories of Ogden Whitney, edited by Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro. (New York Review Comics, $19.95.) The cartoonist Liana Finck introduces this collection of delirious, daftly satisfying love comics from the early 1960s by an unsung master. “These stories are ridiculous,” she writes. They’re also unexpected and complicated. “At first glance, the collection’s title is a misnomer,” our reviewer Ed Park writes. “There’s hardly anything strange about attractive (white, cis) men and women overcoming obstacles — psychological and otherwise — and finding their way to each other at last. Yet even the most hackneyed plots reveal a perverse fascination with fate, and perhaps a witty critique of the entire business of love.”