The Pale King, by the late David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, $27.99; Back Bay, $16.99), stretched the possibilities of the novel as a genre and conveyed humanity upon even the faceless drones in the hated Internal Revenue Service. It was meant to be as ambitious an undertaking as his earlier 1000-page Infinite Jest, and while the book lacks his usual complexity and leaves aspects of the plot unfinished, for most of his audience the form and style will be entirely familiar, incomplete only in the perfection for which David was striving. Through these fragments, Wallace’s skill shines through in two central themes: the desire to find heroic purpose even in the tedium of ordinary life, and the struggle to see beyond one’s own blinkered perspective to connect with one's fellow human beings. – Andrew Getman

History

Encyclopedic in its approach, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking, $30; Penguin, $18) provides the most comprehensive and penetrating portrait yet of the legendary black activist. Marable, a historian who died on the eve of this book’s publication, drew on diaries, letters, FBI and CIA documents, and interviews with people who had been silent for decades. He peels away the layers of myth that have arisen around Malcolm as a result of Malcolm’s own memoir and the efforts of both supporters and opponents after his assassination in 1965 at the age of 39. The result is a biography that meticulously charts the complex and contradiction-filled evolution of Malcolm’s political and religious beliefs and also sets Malcolm’s life within the larger context of 20th-century racial developments. Bradley Graham

General Nonfiction

The world into which Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things was reborn in 1417 felt threatened by the ideas expressed there. But The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W.W. Norton, $26.95) history took in this event, from a God-centered to a material conception of the universe, influenced subsequent thinkers and changed the course of Western culture. In his riveting and suspenseful story of those ideas and their rediscovery, the eminent scholar Stephen Greenblatt, author of the popular Will in the World, recounts how Poggio Bracciolini, a canny and ruthless papal apparatchik, but also an intrepid book hunter with exquisite handwriting, found the only surviving copy of this classical masterpiece secreted in a remote German monastery. Greenblatt, himself heir to the humanistic turn effected by the surfacing of On the Nature of Things, has made narrative central to our understanding of literature and culture and unfailingly finds anecdotes that catch the reflected light of an entire cosmos.