Because we work in newspapers, and are as susceptible to buzzy jargon as the next person, we sometimes refer to “the mix” when we try to explain how we make our assignments or schedule our reviews each week. It’s an amorphous term, redolent of Chex cereal or disco floors or cocktail bars, and not easy to define in the context of books journalism. But this week’s recommended titles offer a perfect illustration of the concept: On the surface, these eight books have little in common, but taken together they add up to a broad snapshot of life today. One novel looks at gun culture; another explores how feminism has changed over the years. There’s the memoir of a woman raised among survivalists, and a look at the Syrian civil war, and a deep investigative dive into the 2016 presidential election and possible Russian interference. Less topical, but still fascinating, is Yunte Huang’s thorough history of the 19th-century conjoined twins Chang and Eng. Finally, because sometimes all you want is an original mind or a great escapist plot, we’ve also found a surreal story collection and a retro thriller and introduced them into the — well, you know.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

INSEPARABLE: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous With American History, by Yunte Huang. (Liveright, $28.95.) Yunte Huang’s new book recounts the extraordinary 19th-century lives of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese twins.” The brothers went from the humiliations of showcased servitude all across America to a life of Southern comfort in small-town North Carolina, fathering at least 21 children between them and at one point owning as many as 32 slaves. Our critic Jennifer Szalai calls “Inseparable” a “contemplative yet engrossing” history.

THE FEMALE PERSUASION, by Meg Wolitzer. (Riverhead, $28.) Of all the political threads that permeate Wolitzer’s 12th novel, the most interesting is the challenge of intergenerational feminism. The book “is speaking to the larger issue of ambition: who has it, what curtails it and what it means to reframe it,” Lena Dunham writes in the Book Review. “But when all is said and done, Wolitzer is an infinitely capable creator of human identities that are as real as the type on this page, and her love of her characters shines more brightly than any agenda.”

AETHERIAL WORLDS: Stories, by Tatyana Tolstaya. Translated by Anya Migdal. (Knopf, $25.95.) Tolstaya’s remarkable short stories are all about people haunted by their flashing glimpses of shadow worlds — moments of pure transcendence when the dull plastic coating of reality peels back to reveal something vastly more precious underneath. “Tolstaya is doubly haunted by the past, both by its lostness and by its stubborn refusal to go away,” Lev Grossman writes in his review. “She is blessed, and cursed, with the mystic’s gift of seeing the shades of the departed.”