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Paperback Row

New in Paperback: ‘All Adults Here’ and ‘Fire in Paradise’

DOWN THE HIGHWAY: The Life of Bob Dylan, by Howard Sounes. (Grove, 608 pp., $22.) This 20th-anniversary edition celebrating Dylan’s upcoming 80th birthday includes a new chapter by the author on the past 10 years of Dylan’s life. “No matter the time or place,” Perry Meisel wrote in his 2001 review of the book in these pages, “Dylan comes alive, strumming his guitar in a studio in Nashville or hurrying down Macdougal Street with the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the wind.”

ALL ADULTS HERE, by Emma Straub. (Riverhead, 384 pp., $17.) After she sees an acquaintance of 40 years (whom she never liked) get hit by a school bus, a widow decides to tell her grown children about her affair with her female haircutter in Straub’s comic fourth novel, which our reviewer, Stephen McCauley, called “bigly entertaining.”

HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE: Stories, by Souvankham Thammavongsa. (Back Bay, 192 pp., $15.99.) Thanks to their author’s “gift for the gently absurd,” as our reviewer, Sarah Resnick, put it, the stories in this heart-wrenching debut collection by a Canadian poet born to Laotian refugees — a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist — “never feel dour or predictable, even when their outcomes are by some measure bleak.”

FIRE IN PARADISE: An American Tragedy, by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano. (Norton, 272 pp., $16.95.) According to our reviewer, Rachel Monroe, this “gripping account” of the November 2018 Camp Fire — which killed 85 people and destroyed 90 percent of the homes in and around Paradise, Calif. — has “the narrative propulsion and granular detail of the best breaking-news disaster journalism.”

NOBODY WILL TELL YOU THIS BUT ME: A True (as Told to Me) Story, by Bess Kalb. (Vintage, 224 pp., $16.) “Narrated” by her late grandmother as woman-to-woman advice, Kalb’s “oral history” of her family’s journey from Russia’s pogroms to the American dream pays particular attention, our reviewer, Miranda Popkey, noted, to the uniquely special relationship “that skips a generation.”

RED DRESS IN BLACK AND WHITE, by Elliot Ackerman. (Vintage, 336 pp., $16.) In this “superbly written,” “entirely absorbing” novel set amid the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, the unstable marriage of a debt-ridden Turkish real estate developer and an American art patron mirrors “a whole country’s instability,” our reviewer, Joan Silber, observed, as well as the “web of interests and counterinterests” in which the country is embroiled.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 20 of the Sunday Book Review. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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