Summer Reading

‘I am Vaclav the Magnificent,” the young magician introduces his performance, explaining that he comes from a “land of enchanted knowledge passed down from the ages” and is reappearing “here, in America, in New York, in Brooklyn (which is a Borough), near Coney Island, which is a famous place of magic in the great land of opportunity (which is, of course, America), where anyone can become anything, where a hobo today is tomorrow a businessman in a three-pieces suit and a businessman yesterday is later this afternoon a hobo.”

 This season offers some remarkable new nonfiction titles, on some unexpected, previously unexplored topics. Readers can imagine — and try to understand — other lives, other times.

 Having worked intensely with the reclusive Henry Roth for the last four years of his life, sculpting thousands of manuscript pages into his four-volume “Mercy of a Rude Stream” series, and now having overseen the editing of his final, posthumous novel, “An American Type,” I have unwittingly become something of an Roth authority.