Books are like food. Sometimes you nosh on a little of this and a little of that — méli-mélo, the French say — other times you spend a month eating a whole cow. It’s all sustenance in the end. And books, like food, are a proven way to introduce yourself to other cultures. This week, we serve up five novels from Europe (one from Britain, one from Austria, three from France), along with the biography of a 19th-century British poet and a debut American novel that moves between Vietnam and Hartford. We round things out with a neuropsychologist’s account of his own mental illness, and a prominent conservative’s defense of his political philosophy: food for thought, even if you generally avoid red meat.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

THE CAPITAL, by Robert Menasse. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. (Liveright, $27.95.) This melancholy and satirical novel, set in contemporary Brussels, is in part about bureaucratic infighting at the E.U. It evidences a sharp awareness of the forces remaking European life, with Brexit as only one example. “If you tasked an excellent writer with turning a tall stack of recent issues of The Economist into a novel, you might get ‘The Capital,’” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “Somehow I mean this as high praise.”

LET ME NOT BE MAD: My Story of Unraveling Minds, by A. K. Benjamin. (Dutton, $27.) In this magnificently unsettling book, A. K. Benjamin — a clinical neuropsychologist writing under a pseudonym — weaves together the stories of his patients’ “unraveling minds” with his own history of mental illness. “There is a conventional insistence that the personal not contaminate the professional in the therapeutic relationship,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “In the case of Benjamin, we see how fully he is able to attend to his patients precisely because of his humanity, particularly his past.”

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS, by Ocean Vuong. (Penguin Press, $26.) The poet’s fiction debut is an experimental, highly poetic novel whose structural conceit is ostensibly a letter written from a son to his mother. The book is brilliant in the way it pays attention not to what our thoughts make us feel, but to what our feelings make us think. “The tenderness of the prose feels like a triumph against a world hellbent on embittering the tenderhearted,” Justin Torres writes in his review. “In today’s culture we’re often offered the choice between the ironic shrug of nihilism and positivity-obsessed pop psychology, which suggests that changing one’s thought patterns can control and produce desirable feelings. Vuong rejects that binary.”