Arts & Lifestyle

September signals the end of summer, but thankfully not the end of summer produce. So much of is at its prime right now. Certainly tomatoes are, and sweet peppers. They both need the whole season to achieve their juicy ripeness. They’re worth the wait, perfect for building a menu around, as are late-season plums, which are now coming in. This menu employs all of these, and, best of all, it’s very doable.

To start, a drool-worthy carpaccio made from vine-ripe tomatoes. Though traditionally meat based, carpaccio, said to have been named for Vittore Carpaccio, the Venetian painter known for his use of deep red, can refer to any dish that is presented thinly sliced and spread across the plate. But the recipe here is much more than a mere plate of sliced tomatoes. The key is using truly ripe ones, no matter what color they are, but large red ones are ideal.

Use your best extra-virgin olive oil for the dressing, which also features briny shallots and capers, a whiff of garlic and a touch of anchovy. Finish with a handful of torn basil leaves for an easily executed first course.

For a seasonal main, firm, meaty fish like striped bass or halibut makes a good choice for pairing with the sweet pepper harvest. It’s fine to use standard bell peppers, but preferably, find some wonderful shapely variety like the curvy corno di toro, available in shades of red, yellow and orange. An assortment of colors makes for a dramatic rendition. Cooking all of the peppers slowly in olive oil, with onion and garlic, punched up with cayenne and smoked paprika, intensifies their sweetness.

To maximize the peppers and avoid any odd scraps, cut them in half lengthwise, right through the stem, then remove the stems, veins and seeds (as opposed to cutting off the tops and bottoms first, as some recipes advise).

I recommend making the pepper mixture well in advance, even a day ahead, so the only cooked-to-order parts of the dish will be the preparing the fish and any last-minute herb chopping.

To finish, enter those late-summer plums — especially the small dark purple, yellow-fleshed Italian ones, which are a delight, and highly recommended. (If you can’t find them, other types of plum or even pluots will work for this dessert.)

In my head, a steaming bowl of risotto has always been wintry fare, maybe because I associate it with cozy dinner parties and other cold-weather pursuits. But David Tanis has made me rethink my life yet again, this time with his ruddy-hued summer tomato risotto.

By substituting chopped ripe tomatoes for some of the liquid and olive oil for the butter, he brings a complex depth to the mix while also lightening and brightening it. Then, to contrast with all the juicy sweetness, he replaces the usual Parmesan with pecorino or provolone and adds red pepper flakes for a kick.

Another assumption-buster: You don’t need to stand there forever stirring the risotto pot. Just gradually add the liquid, give it a good stir every once in a while and it will simmer into creamy perfection. Add an arugula salad and it’s a beautiful peak tomato meal, in between your BLTs and gazpachos.

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Tomato Risotto

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Labor Day sneaked right up on me this year, and I’ve been on the fence about what to cook. But an irresistible candidate for the main slot is Samin Nosrat’s chapli burgers, inspired by the patty-shaped Pakistani chapli kebabs. Samin spices ground beef assertively with garam masala, cumin, coriander and ginger, adding pounded pomegranate seeds for a sour, juicy pop. Served with an herby yogurt and tamarind ketchup, the burgers are a punchy, fragrant alternative to the same-old-same-old cookout fare.

For the side dish slot, Ham El-Waylly’s zucchini-peach salad with creamy lime dressing will shine next to pretty much anything you may be grilling. Ham makes a strong case for zuke summer: You can let them sit with a little salt and they’ll soften beautifully with no cooking whatsoever. And zucchini is always down to absorb whatever dressings and seasonings you like. For this recipe, he went for a mix of sour cream, lime juice and zest, and fresh dill, all of which also work wonderfully with the sliced ripe peaches. Speedy and colorful, zesty and sweet, it’s a Labor Day weekend shoo-in!

Another shoo-in is Lidey Heuck’s instant classic, Parmesan-crusted chicken. The thin cutlets are swabbed with mayonnaise, breaded in grated cheese and herbs, and then baked until golden and crisp all over. They have the crunchy appeal of their fried cousins, but none of the oily mess.

I’m also putting Connie Chung’s ginger-scallion steamed fish (as adapted by Ali Slagle) on my list. Serve these tender, easy-to-eat cubes of salmon with rice and a crunchy cucumber salad for a crowd-pleasing meal any time of the year.

For dessert, I’m thinking cool, creamy and tangy sweet. Enter Ifrah F. Ahmed’s mango labaniyad. Based on a beloved eggy pudding that’s a fixture in Somali households during Ramadan, Ifrah’s version has mango puréed into the custard as well as cubed on top. Just the thing to end your Labor Day cookout on the sunniest, fruitiest note.

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Planning a wedding has become so expensive that some couples are asking their guests to pay to attend their special day.

Hassan Ahmed, 23, is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston, where he lives. Mr. Ahmed said he hadn’t heard back from many of his 125 wedding guests. But he has already spent over $100,000 on the wedding, including deposits for the venue, the D.J. and the photographer. In a video on TikTok, he said he was confused by the response, noting that many of his guests had spent more money on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets.

According to a study by the wedding planning website the Knot, the average cost of a wedding ceremony and reception in 2023 was $35,000 — an increase of $5,000 from the year before. The Knot surveyed about 10,000 couples who had married in the United States in 2023.

But the approach of selling tickets to a wedding has mostly upset guests, many of whom have expressed the opinion that it is in poor taste for the couple to put their financial burden onto their guests and that there are more cost-effective ways for couples to have a wedding.

Matthew Shaw, the founder of Sauveur, a wedding planning company in London, said that selling tickets “introduces a strange relationship between you and your guests, turning your guests into customers.”

He added, “You’re no longer hosting — you’re offering them a paid experience, which introduces a very different narrative in terms of what guests are expecting.”

Though the cost of having a wedding is increasing, Mr. Shaw added: “I think there’s this assumption that we must have these big weddings. You can have really magical scaled-back and simpler celebrations, or more intimate and fewer guests. When we all went through the pandemic, we found other ways to celebrate.”

The cost of being a guest is also becoming more expensive. The average cost of attending a wedding is $580, according to a 2023 study by the Knot, which surveyed 1,000 people who had attended a wedding in the previous year. That was an increase of $120 compared with 2021.

Nova Styles and Reemo Styles, who were married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in June 2023, charged guests $333 and sold all their tickets.

The couple, who live on the Upper East Side, said they had not charged guests to cover the cost of their wedding, which was upward of $70,000; rather, they had needed to winnow their guest list down significantly.

The couple hired a double-decker bus that took guests to New York landmarks that were significant in their love story. The first stop was the legal ceremony at the cathedral. Other stops included Hudson Yards, where Mr. Styles, 31, proposed, and the 42nd Street AMC theater, where they played a video of their journey together. The final stop was the reception, which was held at a private event space on the 102nd floor at the One World Observatory.

The couple originally had a 350-person guest list, but the bus had space for only 60 people. “It was stressful,” Mr. Styles said. “We had to figure out a way for them to choose us, because we can’t choose them.”

Ms. Styles added, “We wanted people who really wanted to be there.” They felt that the ticket system was the best way to do it.

Lola Marie, 41, a close friend of the couple who paid the $333 ticket price, was at first confused when she received the invitation.

“I was definitely hesitant,” Ms. Marie said. “I was shocked. ‘Pay for a wedding? I never heard nothing like that. That sounds crazy. Who y’all think y’all are?’”

She called the couple, and once they explained their reasoning for selling tickets to their wedding, she understood. She decided to pay immediately after the call.

“It was worth more than $333,” Ms. Marie said, adding that she knew the couple’s intention was not to make money from their guests. She said she had a lot of fun celebrating and would have paid much more for the steak and lobster dinner at the top of One World Trade Center, with stunning views of the city and a surprise performance by the rapper Fabolous.

Jamie Wolfer, the founder of Wolfer & Co., a wedding planning company in Waco, Texas, said that while she understood that each couple would have a unique situation, generally, charging guests for tickets “really does kind of feel like a social faux pas” that can lead to conflicts between couples and their guests.

Mr. Shaw added that he could see a situation where couples ask guests to throw in $50 because times are tough, or a request for cash gifts. “But this is serious money people are asking,” he said.

In 2014, Noam Griegst, a Danish photographer and videographer, was working in Shanghai on a campaign for Cartier when he decided to open an Instagram account for Griegst, the cult — but dormant — brand founded by his father, Arje.

“I couldn’t keep it on the shelf,” Noam said, and in 2018 — two years after his father died, at 78 — he began commissioning artisans to reproduce its vintage jewelry and decorative objects from archival molds.

After all, the 54-year-old said during a recent interview, he had photographed beautiful things in his career, but “none of them came close to the Griegst universe.”

Arje Griegst was born in 1938 to a middle-class Jewish family in Copenhagen. The son of a talented goldsmith and engraver, he trained with his father’s contemporaries, and, in 1961, the silverware company Georg Jensen granted Arje a kind of sponsorship. He was given a bag of precious gems and told to go find himself in Paris.

“After traveling in Spain, too,” Noam said, “he came back doing a melted-brain look with raw rubies and emeralds.”

He said his father’s “baroque-punk vision” — “which was just bananas” — broke from the spell of modernism on Denmark at the time and secured him a following as a “bad boy” designer. Arje’s instinct, his son said, was for opulent Art Nouveau and Surrealist aesthetics, similar to those of Gaudí and Dalí.

And now, the brand’s revival is a “parallel to the Schiaparelli revival we are seeing,” said Nina Hald, the editor of Au.Clock, a goldsmith and watch trade publication in Denmark.

Kerstin Wickman, a professor emeritus at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm and the author of the 2013 book “Griegst: Goldsmith, Designer and Sculptor,” said that Arje was a “technical virtuoso” whose works display his own sense of humor as well as horror.

One of Arje’s most celebrated pieces was a modern tiara of flowers visited by a spider, butterfly and beetle, made in the 1970s for Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. For many months he had hammered poppy petals from sheets of 21-karat gold, carved dewdrops from a hunk of moonstone and fashioned buds out of a chunk of Baltic amber given to him by the queen.

Margrethe, who abdicated in January, has worn the tiara, named Danish Morning, during state visits. She recently described the avant-garde ornament as “lovely,” if “a little tricky to wear.”

Family Faces

In 2018, the revived brand rented a showroom a five-minute stroll from the Royal Danish Ballet’s theater in Copenhagen. Noam, now the brand’s creative director, said it felt as if the company were “fated” to occupy the space as his father had made some important early work — delicate pieces with gold wire and kinetic charms — for Anna Laerkesen, one of the company’s prima ballerinas. And that was where Noam, who regularly photographed its dancers, met his wife, Amalie Adrian.

Amalie, 34, works as an adviser for Griegst and often is the model for the brand’s dreamy imagery, which Noam photographs. (He has a younger sister, the painter Lia Griegst, who is not involved with the company. It now has two other employees: an assistant and a sales and production person.)

At the showroom one afternoon in June, Noam brought out two pieces designed in the 1960s: Burning Flower, which his father created while teaching art in Jerusalem, is a gold brooch in the shape of a trippy, tormented poppy (“See the bee coming at its face?” Noam asked), and Face of the Night, a necklace with a drippy, open-mouth figure that recalled Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.”

Face of the Night, set with opals, pearls and diamonds, sold at the time for $10,000, roughly the equivalent of $100,000 today. It could be recreated for about $115,000, Noam said, considering the labor and the cost of gems.

Arje’s decorative works and jewelry often had faces, self-portraits or portrayals of family members. For example, the reissued 18-karat gold necklace called Flowerbud Face ($15,361) was modeled in the image of Irene Griegst, Arje’s wife and Noam and Lia’s mother. She had met Arje in Jerusalem, where she was studying enameling.

It was Irene who in 1978 insisted on opening a jewelry store and workshop in central Copenhagen, which she ran. She also had her husband teach her his craft.

Noam said that Arje’s early delicate gold-wire pieces reminded his mother of traditional embroidery in Morocco, where she was born, so she called her own style “sewing jewelry.” She made a name for herself with earrings and headpieces of tiny pearls, coral, and turquoise and spangly elements, all connected with gold wire. “My mother was the queen mother of the tingle-tangle, wingle-wangle,” Noam said.

Though Irene participated in the brand’s revival, Noam said that her protectiveness and fear that their work would be copied had made her deeply reluctant to engage in modern commerce. He said that his mother used to say, “You don’t know what you have between your hands.”

“I’d tell her, ‘Mommy, we need to be on Instagram,’” Noam said. “‘We need a website. We can’t hide.’” Irene was still making jewelry when she died unexpectedly last year, at 78.

Noam and Amalie cleared the couple’s apartments in Jerusalem, Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, as well as an old workshop in Copenhagen, and the showroom’s vast basement now stores what they found: a trove of finished and unfinished pieces, prototypes, wax leftovers, molds, gems, and gold. The showroom, Noam joked, is “now sitting atop this actual Ali Baba cave — and my parents’ ghosts come and go.”

“New Potatoes”

The couple said they were aware of the difficulty of blending fine art and business. In addition to sales from the showroom, the brand’s website and a relationship with four of the Dover Street Market stores that began in 2018, their retail efforts are focused on galleries and trunk shows. “We have to be careful,” Amalie said. “Griegst is too personal.”

The brand is working with artisans, whom Noam declined to identify, in the same cities and regions where Arje’s work was originally produced. Bronze items such as patinated branch- and brushstroke-like candlesticks designed in the 1960s and the 1990s are again being made by foundries in Tuscany (from $3,800).

The high-karat gold jewelry is being made by a bisque molding and casting partner in Copenhagen, while another local artisan has made the solid silver pieces that the brand calls catchalls, and which Arje made in bronze for his own use as cigar ashtrays.

The brand’s Spira cutlery, which Arje began sketching as a boy, was released by Georg Jensen in 2002 and reissued in collaboration with the silverware company in 2021; a seven-piece place setting sells for $3,880. And Xanadu, a glassware series produced by the Danish glass factory Holmegaard from the 1980s to the 2000s, was revived last year when a retired glassblower helped create two editions of the series’s large vase, now sold in cyber-yellow, brown and several shades of blue or green (from $4,090).

Noam said sometimes the brand’s mold maker can include specific stones requested by clients in vintage jewelry designs such as the Stardust collection, inspired in the 1990s by the Hubble Space Telescope’s galactic imagery and recently reissued.

Griegst’s best seller across all its categories is the Spiral jewelry collection, created in the 1970s, with 18-karat gold rings, earrings, necklaces and bracelets in snakeish swirls that Noam said was inspired by caramel (starting at $512 for a single stud earring).

This month Noam had a preliminary meeting with the Danish porcelain company Royal Copenhagen to discuss reissuing his father’s glazed porcelain jewelry, which included personified ocean waves, oak trees, tulips and a seedling-like fetus based on his daughter as a baby (it was added to a belt that Queen Margrethe wore in celebration of the porcelain maker’s 200th anniversary in 1975).

During the last decade of his life, Arje had developed Parkinson’s disease and was unable to work, but, his son said, he wanted to make furniture and wallpaper. So the brand has been working with the Danish color house Bleo to develop one of Arje’s wallpaper designs, and it intends to reproduce some of Irene’s earrings with artisans in Jaipur, India, next year.

“And I want to turn the earth — get some new potatoes in there,” Noam said, explaining that he has started to look for a jewelry designer with what he called a “compatible voice” so Griegst might offer new work as well as heritage pieces.

“There is a whole new world waiting,” he said.

When the acidic lime color on the cover of “brat,” the latest album by the British pop star Charli XCX, blazed through social media accounts in July, Bea Bongiasca, a jewelry designer in Milan, felt the heat.

“People are much more interested in this chartreuse-y green than they were last year,” Ms. Bongiasca wrote in an email. “I can see it both in my brand’s sales, which have increased by at least 25 percent in our lime green styles, as well as by looking at how people are dressed on the street. It has definitely replaced last summer’s ‘Barbie’ pink.”

Brent Neale Winston, a designer in New York who has made jewels set with Brazilian opals in the same slime shade as “brat” green, also took notice.

“We were talking about this in our office, which is female and trends younger than me,” Ms. Winston said. “I said, ‘Explain this brat girl summer to me.’ The word ‘brat’ to me means you’re acting entitled. It’s a negative connotation.

“They’re like, ‘No, this means you’re owning who you are; you’re being true to yourself; you’re doing you.’ Which is so funny because it equates to the color. It’s a very bold color. It’s not for everyone.”

Indeed. Some have labeled brat green “intentionally nauseating,” “abrasive” and “off-putting.”

Among jewelers, however, it’s always a “brat” summer.

That particular green is the color of peridot, the gem variety of the mineral olivine and August’s polarizing birthstone. A semiprecious gem, it typically sells for anywhere from $40 to $400 per carat.

“A lot of people say, ‘I don’t like that color,’ and then you show them the brighter greens as opposed to the olive greens — which they think peridot is — and they seem to be much more interested,” said Eric Braunwart, the owner of Columbia Gem House, a gemstone cutter and supplier in Vancouver, Wash.

In the gem trade, where demand is often driven by supply, peridot’s spotty availability is another reason the stone — most commonly mined in Arizona, Pakistan and Myanmar — has never really become popular.

But a new mine, established in 2015 in the Jilin Province of northeastern China, may soon change that. Located in the foothills of the Changbai Mountains, the Fuli Gemstones mine has some peridots already in circulation from a geological survey. But Fuli is planning to start sampling the mine at the end of this year and to begin full commercial production in 2025, said Pia Tonna, Fuli’s executive director.

“The mine can produce up to 60 million carats, but we want to bring it to market carefully,” Ms. Tonna said.

“Some gems have flooded the market; they come and go,” she said. “But peridot has never been exploited; it fell off the map because of lack of supply. Now there’s this huge deposit.”

To help stoke excitement about peridot, Fuli hired Joanna Hardy, a jewelry lecturer and gemologist in London, to give a presentation about the gem in February in Tucson, Ariz., during the annual gem shows.

“When Fuli asked me to lecture about peridot, I thought, ‘Longer than 10 minutes? What am I going to say?’” Ms. Hardy recalled. “I started to research it and thought, my God, I can talk for two hours. It was found on Zabargad, St. John’s Island, in the Red Sea, this tiny island that’s absolutely uninhabitable.”

“No fresh water — the only thing that lives on this island is snakes,” she added. “And peridot.”

Elsewhere in the gem world, some varieties of chrysoberyl, demantoid garnet and sphene come close to approximating “brat” green. None, however, compare in brilliance or value with green diamonds.

Larry West, a dealer in New York who specializes in rare natural colored diamonds, recently acquired a 1.2-carat vivid yellowish-green diamond that, for marketing purposes, he named the Cosmic Green. And while he would not disclose a precise price, he said it was valued at more than $2 million.

“I’ve seen hundreds of green diamonds over the years,” Mr. West said by phone recently. “This is the most saturated and brilliant version I’ve seen. It kind of looks fake it’s so good.”

Yet the very point of “brat” green is that it is meant to be an unapologetic expression of authenticity, said Laurie Pressman, the vice president of the Pantone Color Institute in Carlstadt, N.J. (And one possible reason Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign seized on the color in July, when her social media account on X, formerly Twitter, rebranded with the hue.)

“‘Brat’ green is not a political statement as much as it is about being confident about who you are,” Ms. Pressman said. “To those of us that sit in the trend space, these sour greens and saturated yellows are adding zing and unpredictability — they’re shaking up the energy.”

Stephanie Gottlieb, a jeweler in New York City who has nearly 500,000 followers on Instagram, said she channeled that energy in late July, when she wore a bright green outfit complete with iridescent lime Jimmy Choos, to her birthday celebration in Southampton, N.Y.

“‘Dirty martini’ was the intended theme,” Ms. Gottlieb said. “So I just kind of rode the green train there. I’d gone to the Tucson gem shows for my first time in February and one of the first booths I came across had these demantoid green garnets, and I was just obsessed with the color. I bought one of the tennis necklaces, and I ended up wearing that for my birthday.

“It was green glory.”

This article is part of our Design special section about creating space with the look and feel for one person.

For Don Katz, a typical day begins with a light breakfast at his home in Los Angeles before he heads to his backyard pool to swim a few laps. After a therapeutic soak in the spa, Mr. Katz prepares to go to work on his ceramics.

His commute isn’t far: He passes through the French doors of his bedroom, down three steps to his backyard, makes a sharp right around the spa, then takes a few more steps before turning left into the free-standing ceramics studio behind his house. But for Mr. Katz, who is 48 and lives alone, every step has been carefully planned to make the journey as seamless as possible. This is because he is blind.

At the age of 25, Mr. Katz lost his sight after bacterial meningitis put him in a monthlong coma and left him paralyzed. Doctors told him he would never walk again, but after years of rehabilitation and occupational therapy, Mr. Katz relearned how to walk, feed himself and adjust to his sightless reality. He even picked up some new hobbies along the way.

“I first took a pottery class at the Braille Institute Los Angeles,” he said on a phone call. “I had been trying for 23 years to figure out what to do with my life, and ceramics just fits me. I can sit, I can be creative and I never run out of ideas of what to make.”

It took a while for Mr. Katz to convince his parents that he could live on his own, but in 2021 he bought a 1,680-square-foot, 1928 Spanish Revival home, picking it for its proximity to the restaurants and nightlife of West Hollywood and for its single-level plan. “I am mobility impaired on top of my blindness, but I knew I could navigate the layout independently, and I thought I could replace the detached garage with a ceramics studio,” he said. “So I bought it sight unseen.”

To design the ceramics studio and revamp the yard, Mr. Katz contacted Johnston Marklee, a local architectural firm he admired because of its work on the Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios at the University of California, Los Angeles. The firm referred him to a smaller studio in the Highland Park neighborhood called Knowhow Shop, which had worked with many artists.

“Because we have our own fabrication studio, we could build models and communicate with Don in ways typical firms might not be able to,” said Justin Rice, who founded Knowhow Shop in 2010 with Kagan Taylor, on a video call. “We started with a generalized idea of how a blind person might communicate with us, but we quickly learned that Don has a very specific way of navigating and understanding the world.”

The partners learned that Mr. Katz’s sighted memories of an early trip to Morocco made him partial to arched windows and doors and that his enhanced sensitivity to sound, smell and touch yielded unexpected design possibilities.

Though they typically use drawings and physical models to render a design scheme, the partners worked only with media that Mr. Katz could feel and touch. Their first step was to build a five-and-a-half-foot-long model of the property — 75 percent larger than the scale they usually use. This ampleness allowed Mr. Katz to reach into the model and move around blocks representing his pottery wheel, kiln and furnishings to test different layouts. Reaching over the model’s partial-height walls, he could feel the location of windows, doorways and rooms, while textured fiberboard differentiated landscape elements from hardscape.

Although they didn’t make any changes to the existing house, the designers replicated it at scale in poplar wood alongside the model of the ceramics studio. “It was unbelievable,” Mr. Katz said of his first experience touching the model. “Before that I did not know what my house looked like.”

Inside the 630-square-foot built studio, the designers lined windows in recessed panels of birch plywood as a navigation aid for Mr. Katz as he trailed his hand along walls, and they built casework with setbacks to identify each door and drawer. Shelves have lipped edges to prevent fragile ceramics from slipping off.

The studio and exterior are organized around what the designers call “moments of navigational grounding,” or “beacons.” These include a courtyard demarcating the entrance to the studio; a set of four concrete “welcome mats” integrated in the exterior mahogany decking to delineate thresholds; and a set of outdoor fountains. “When Don gets to those spots, he knows where he is and what his next options are,” Mr. Taylor said.

Designed by Chris Kallmyer, an artist who makes sound-based objects and installations as part of a project called Furniture Music, the granite fountain in the front yard acts as sonic wayfinding for Mr. Katz, who often depends on rideshares for transportation. “Sometimes Don couldn’t locate his home after being dropped off,” Mr. Kallmyer said. “A fountain is as ignorable as it is interesting, so it can be on all the time to guide Don home.”

A second, smaller fountain in the backyard attracts birds with a gentler sound. Though Mr. Katz originally requested “a concrete jungle” to avoid tripping over lawn, the designers convinced him to include landscaping. “The garden acts as a bird habitat and connects Don to the wider biome of the city,” Mr. Kallmyer said. “He’s not alone because these birds come visit.”

Now, as Mr. Katz prepares to host his first open studio on the 23rd anniversary of his blindness, he reflects on what it has meant to live in a place all his own. “It’s my sanctuary,” he said. “I call it House of Liberty because it’s freedom for me here.”

For the designers, the process was about entering a specialized realm of the senses. “It was about figuring out Don’s strengths and preferences and leaning into those,” Mr. Taylor said. Mr. Kallmyer agreed: “It reoriented us to think of Don as enabled in these other ways, helping us uncover new possibilities for creating more layered, rich and sensory places.”

An American agent infiltrates a commune of French environmentalists in Kushner’s philosophical rendition of the spy novel. The anarchists should be no match for the agent’s clever tactics, but her loyalties and opinions prove to be vulnerable after she meets the group’s mysterious leader.

Scribner, Sept. 3

Lovely One, by Ketanji Brown Jackson

“My march to this shining moment has sometimes been a steep and emotionally grueling climb,” writes Jackson, the first Black woman named to the Supreme Court, in a memoir that nevertheless emphasizes the “blessings” that sustained her: dedicated parents, encouraging teachers, cheerleading roommates, loving daughters and her college boyfriend — now husband — whose “partnership, which made this possible, is everything.”

Random House, Sept. 3

The eternal conflict between making art and selling out gets a fresh take in Senna’s new novel, which follows a struggling fiction writer into the thrilling yet treacherous TV industry, where she lands a deal to make a biracial comedy with a hotshot producer.

Riverhead, Sept. 3

Nexus, by Yuval Noah Harari

In “Nexus,” the best-selling author of “Sapiens” takes on our species’ means of communication. Harari looks to philosophy, science, political theory and psychology to present a cleareyed primer on the flow of information from the dawn of human history to the present — and, perhaps more crucially, into the future. In a time when communication seems both more accessible and more elusive than ever, what we can learn, and how can we improve? For homo sapiens, the stakes have never been higher.

Random House, Sept. 10

Paula Spencer has been an embattled character in Doyle’s fiction for nearly 30 years. In his latest novel, she is finally at ease, having left behind her addictions and, at 66, pulled together a manageable working life. But when her eldest daughter shows up at her door with a family crisis, Paula must take her in and contend with the demons of their past.

Viking, Sept. 10

Reagan, by Max Boot

The actor Ronald Reagan started his political career as a New Deal Democrat who fought for social justice. He ended it as the Republican president of the United States. In this biography, Boot — a notable historian who fell out of love with conservatism as another American president, Donald J. Trump, took over the movement — tells Reagan’s story, tugging at the enigma of his life and searching for the seeds of Trumpism in the works and days of the 40th president.

Liveright, Sept. 10

Stolen Pride, by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In 2016, commentators looked to Hochschild’s “Strangers in Their Own Land,” about Tea Party conservatives in Louisiana, for insight into the forces that sent Trump to White House. Now, the author and renowned sociologist is back with a follow-up. In the first months of Trump’s presidency, white supremacists descended on an Appalachian coal mining town for a march. Talking to participants, wary residents and government officials, Hochschild reveals a swirl of anxieties and resentments that have burst onto the national stage.

New Press, Sept. 10

Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte

This collection of interconnected stories takes on the vagaries of romantic connections and misses — with an emphasis on the latter. In one, a young woman’s infatuation with her friend grows into full-blown obsession; in another, a narrator finally lands a lover after coming out, but things go awry when he tries to communicate his sexual wants.

William Morrow, Sept. 17

On leave from seeing patients after a miscarriage, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is living alone in Paris while her lawyer husband works in London. She spends her days seeing her therapist, remodeling her kitchen, wandering the city and talking to her new neighbor, a 24-year-old feminist activist. The first novel by the author of the nonfiction books “Flâneuse” and “Art Monsters” draws sinewy lines of connection between Paris in 2019, in 1972 and during World War II — and between Anna and her various lovers, psychoanalytic influences and ghosts.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 17

With the members of the Thursday Murder Club in retirement (for now), Osman launches a new team of crime-busters: a high-flying private security expert and her father, a former investigator who thinks homicide is a thing of his past — until a Jackie Collins-like romance writer needs their help.

Pamela Dorman, Sept. 17

Lucky Loser, by Ross Buettner and Susanne Craig

In 2018, the New York Times reporters Buettner and Craig, two of three journalists who won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Trump’s finances, revealed that the 45th president was not a self-made billionaire, as he often claimed, and that his business empire was plagued by shady tax schemes. They expand on their investigation in this new book, which also serves as a biography of the standard-bearer of the Republican Party.

Penguin, Sept. 17

Raising her only child in the poor, rural New Hampshire town where she grew up, Maxwell splices the heart-wrenching story of her daughter’s gender transition — and the family’s ensuing struggle against public opposition and hate — with scenes from her own lakeside youth, involving absent parents and a gay brother who still bears the scars of childhood bullying.

Knopf, Sept. 17

Two brothers cope with grief and complicated relationships in Rooney’s new novel. One is a lawyer who is dating a college student but can’t seem to let go of his ex-girlfriend. His brother is a 20-something competitive chess player who falls for an older woman. The death of their father only widens the rift between them.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 24

Attenberg’s latest novel brings readers deep into the dramas of one fractured family, the Cohens. When Rudy, the patriarch, dies, the family unravels; the novel follows his wife and two daughters over the course of the next 40 years as they try to carve their own paths, working to figure out what it means to live life on your own terms and if you can ever really escape family.

Ecco, Sept. 24

The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Tokarczuk follows in the footsteps of her fellow Nobel laureate Thomas Mann with her new novel, set at a sanitarium in the Polish mountains. A young man with tuberculosis arrives there in 1913, and finds a lively group of patients and residents with much to debate about the era’s social issues. From them he learns of the region’s folk legends and perennial acts of violence, which come uncomfortably close.

Riverhead, Sept. 24

The Israeli Haaretz correspondent Amir Tibon and his wife, Miri, moved to a kibbutz on the border with the Gaza Strip soon after the Israel-Gaza war in 2014. They bought a house and had children. Last year, in the midst of the Oct. 7 attacks, Tibon and his family found themselves sheltering in a safe room, waiting for rescue but anticipating the worst. In his new book, he weaves the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a detailed account of that harrowing day and reflects on the ongoing carnage of the current war.

Little, Brown, Sept. 24

This deep investigation into the political beliefs of Latino Americans by a veteran journalist puts to rest the myth of a monolithic Democratic Latino voting bloc. Ramos’s reporting on Latino Trump supporters, Proud Boy members, border vigilantes, Christian nationalists and even self-described white supremacists reveals a diverse community with a sizable, and increasingly influential, population of ultraconservatives.

Pantheon, Sept. 24

A pair of brilliant but estranged high school friends are among those gathered on a Polynesian island, trying to decide whether sending floating cities out to sea is an environmental solution or a fool’s errand. Judges for the Booker Prize, who’ve already placed this book on their longlist, called it a “capacious and engaging novel, distilling subjects as diverse as oceanography, climate change, the legacies of colonialism and the arc of a lifelong friendship into an exhilaratingly entangled narrative.”

Norton, Sept. 24

Burns’s first stand-alone graphic novel in 19 years is at once an off-kilter teen romance and a portrait of the artist as an obsessive movie fan, culminating in plans to film a tribute to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” at a cabin in the woods.

Pantheon, Sept. 24