I just spent two weeks at the beach, dodging jellyfish and reading for pleasure — fiction, mostly, but also Holly Haworth’s lovely tribute to crickets in The Times Magazine. Between that and the jellies, I’ve got wildlife on the mind. If you do, too, might I direct your attention to a couple of nature books we recommend this week? First up is Tucker Malarkey’s book “Stronghold,” which profiles a fly fisherman and his attempts to save the world’s salmon habitats. Then Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s “Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects,” which offers an entomologist’s charming and enthusiastic defense of creatures more often maligned as pests. In fiction, there’s Olga Tokarczuk’s novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” in which animals may be responsible for a killing spree against humans. I think I spotted a jellyfish reading that one.

Other books we like this week include a reminiscence of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, a memoir of life in the closet, a history of the English publishers Faber & Faber and the latest novel by Cathleen Schine. It’s about grammar! Among other things. Finally, there’s a neat overlap: an essay collection by the eminent literary critic and editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, “Human Relations and Other Difficulties,” and a new novel by her former nanny, Nina Stibbe, who told us in a recent By the Book interview that Wilmers once gave her the fortitude to continue writing.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

HUMAN RELATIONS AND OTHER DIFFICULTIES: Essays, by Mary-Kay Wilmers. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) These essays and book reviews by Mary-Kay Wilmers, the co-founder and editor of The London Review of Books, range from considerations of writers such as Jean Rhys, Alice James and Sybille Bedford to essays about obituaries, child rearing and the nature of seduction. “Wilmers is a summa cum laude graduate of the Joan Didion-Elizabeth Hardwick-Janet Malcolm school of dispassionate restraint and psychological acuity,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “She can do more damage with a raised eyebrow than most critics can do with a mace. Her wit steals in like a cat through an unlatched window.”

FABER & FABER: The Untold Story, by Toby Faber. (Faber & Faber, $28.) The venerable English publishing house Faber & Faber — the longtime home of writers including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes — is celebrating its 90th anniversary. In this new book, Toby Faber, the grandson of the publisher’s founder, relates the company’s story, compiling it from original documents: letters, memos, catalog copy, diary entries. The details in the book “consistently shine,” our critic Dwight Garner writes.