Editors’ Choice

BISMARCK: A Life, by Jonathan Steinberg (Oxford University, $34.95.) With an incisive psychological approach, Steinberg describes a highly complex man who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity.

THE FREE WORLD, by David Bezmozgis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Bezmozgis’s novel, in which a Soviet Jewish family awaits visas in Rome in 1978, overturns clichéd expectations of immigrant idealism.

YOU THINK THAT’S BAD, by Jim Shepard (Knopf, $24.95.) The longest of these rarefied, historically minded short stories explores the life of the special-effects creator of “Godzilla.”

YOU ARE WHAT YOU SPEAK: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, by Robert Lane Greene (Delacorte, $25.) Greene’s very readable survey demonstrates the ways that received ideas about language can lead us astray.

KILLING THE BLACK DOG: A Memoir of Depression, by Les Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $13.) The poet’s memoir consists of a prose account of his depression and 24 poems touching on the subject.

TALLER WHEN PRONE: Poems, by Les Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Viscerally smoldering anger, the signature quality of Murray’s poetry, turns conventional pieties inside out.

QUANTUM MAN: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, by Lawrence M. Krauss (Atlas/Norton, $24.95.) Krauss, a physicist himself, concentrates less on Feynman the odd character and more on the thinker.

ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD: New and Selected Stories, by E. L. Doctorow (Random House, $26.) Tales from the author’s middle and late career.

EMILY, ALONE, by Stewart O’Nan (Viking, $25.95.) In O’Nan’s novel, a quiet widow buys a car and finds herself open to the world again.