Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Diaghilev’s Empire, by Rupert Christiansen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this rich account, Christiansen, a critic and a self-described “incurable balletomane,” narrates the rise and fall of the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev, a charismatic impresario whose creative orbit encompassed not only dancers, choreographers, and composers—among them Nijinsky, Balanchine, and Stravinsky—but also painters and writers, including Picasso and Cocteau. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Feral City, by Jeremiah Moss (Norton). This diary of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City is ruminative, provocative, and moving. Moss, a transsexual man who calls himself a “queer refugee,” moved to the East Village in the early nineteen-nineties. A psychoanalyst and an anti-gentrification activist, he rails against the moneyed residents who have flocked to the city in recent years. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. When We Were Sisters, by Fatimah Asghar (One World). A young Muslim American woman named Kausar narrates this hard-bitten but glimmering début novel, which chronicles her negotiation of the thorny path from childhood to adulthood. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Solenoid, by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter (Deep Vellum). This book, by one of Romania’s leading avant-garde writers, presents itself as the diary of an unnamed failed poet who has become a schoolteacher. The novel’s title refers to a mysterious object on top of which his home is built, which causes levitation and rearranges rooms. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. | 
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