From Sarajevo to New York to Damascus to San Francisco, cities are prominent among this week’s recommended titles: their architecture, their landmarks, their roiling energy and occasional descents into chaos or lawlessness. The real estate journalist Julie Satow delivers a portrait of New York’s iconic Plaza Hotel, once owned by Donald Trump and forever ruled by the fictional Eloise. In twin memoirs, the novelist Aleksandar Hemon (now a Chicagoan) looks back on his childhood in 1970s Sarajevo, before that city was irrevocably altered by war. In “The White Devil’s Daughters,” Julia Flynn Siler offers a history of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the heroic struggle to banish sexual slavery there. And in “Assad or We Burn the Country,” the foreign correspondent Sam Dagher writes about his time in Damascus and the damage the Assad regime has unleashed on Syria.

We also suggest a couple of newly translated novels by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, along with a surreal story collection by Karen Russell and comic novels by Leah Hager Cohen (about a wedding in upstate New York) and Randy Boyagoda (about a college professor turned suicide bomber). Fans of Kate Atkinson’s crime novels probably know that she has a new Jackson Brodie mystery out, but the rest of you should check it out too. Finally, Nigel Hamilton completes his trilogy of biographies about Franklin Roosevelt as a wartime president, and Douglas Brinkley retraces the path to Apollo 11 just in time for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

THE DRY HEART, by Natalia Ginzburg. Translated by Frances Frenaye. (New Directions, paper, $12.95.) HAPPINESS, AS SUCH, by Natalia Ginzburg. Translated by Minna Zallman Proctor. (New Directions, paper, $15.95.) Ginzburg died in 1991, celebrated as one of the great Italian writers. Her work is making its way again into the Anglophone world — encouraged, perhaps, by the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which have something in common with the uncompromising feminism and radical politics of these slender novels. (In “The Dry Heart,” the narrator shoots her husband between the eyes; in “Happiness, as Such,” a firebrand son flees to England.) “Where does style come from? Is it knowingly constructed or unconsciously secreted? Invented or inherited?” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “These questions dog me whenever I read Ginzburg, whose thumbprint is so unmistakable, so inscribed by her time, yet whose work stands so solidly that it requires no background information to appreciate.”

MY PARENTS: AN INTRODUCTION/THIS DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU, by Aleksandar Hemon. (MCD, $28.) In this two-in-one autobiographical volume — the book has two front covers, and its halves have been placed back-to-back rather than sequentially — the Bosnian-born Hemon writes about his parents and his own youth in 1970s Sarajevo. His parents eventually emigrated to Canada, while Hemon settled in Chicago. “Like Hemon’s fiction, the real-life stories in ‘My Parents’ are so exquisitely constructed that their scaffolding is invisible,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “You get the sense that he is trying to understand his parents in a way that his younger self did not.”