Sometimes a book grabs you because it’s especially topical, or relevant to your life. Other times the appeal is more idiosyncratic: a strong voice, a great story, a brilliant mind at play. This week’s recommended titles offer distinctive and wide-ranging pleasures — beginning with a couple of distinctive and wide-ranging essay collections from Martin Amis and Zadie Smith, celebrated novelists who also rank among the best literary critics of their generations. Read them, and you’ll come up with your own recommendations. Or read more of ours! There’s a harrowing autobiographical novel about birth and death all at once, along with memoirs from a Chinese filmmaker and an indigenous Canadian writer. (I told you the list was wide-ranging.) For good measure we also offer a couple of World War II thrillers, one fiction and one non, and deep dives into French food, Israeli politics and the roots of environmentalism.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

THE RUB OF TIME: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017, by Martin Amis. (Knopf, $28.95.) FEEL FREE: Essays, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $28.) The fourth collection of Amis’s nonfiction and Zadie Smith’s new book of essays find these two celebrated writers, friends from different generations, addressing politics, aging, art and more. “Amis’s new book, like the collections that preceded it, is the product of a ferocious yet sensitive mind,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “Even when he is considering writers he’s assessed many times before, his aim is so unerring that he resembles a figure out of Greek myth, firing arrows through ax-heads lined up in a row.” Garner writes that Smith’s “Feel Free” is a “gentler ride,” but in the best pieces, she “presses down hard as a cultural critic, and the rewards are outsize.”

HEART BERRIES: A Memoir, by Terese Marie Mailhot. (Counterpoint, $23.) Mailhot, whose early life on Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia was pocked with poverty, addiction and abuse, began working on this memoir when she had herself committed after a breakdown. In it, she reckons with the wages of intergenerational trauma. Members of her family had passed through Canada’s brutal residential school system, which separated indigenous children from their families and cultures, and, in some cases, subjected them to physical and sexual abuse. The book is a “sledgehammer,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. It has “a mixture of vulnerability and rage, sexual yearning and artistic ambition, swagger and self-mockery that recalls Chris Kraus’s ‘I Love Dick.’”

RISE AND KILL FIRST: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, by Ronen Bergman. Translated by Ronnie Hope. (Random House, $35.) Bergman, a journalist based in Israel, conducted a thousand interviews with political leaders and intelligence operatives for this history of Israel’s secretive program of targeted assassinations. The result is “an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Blending history and investigative reporting, Bergman never loses sight of the ethical questions that arise when a state, founded as a refuge for a stateless people who were targets of a genocide, decides it needs to kill in order to survive.”