From college with love: Elif Batuman (of the Russophilic essay collection The Possessed) takes us back to the 90s with her masterfully funny debut novel, The Idiot (Penguin Press). Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a freshman at Harvard at the height of the Discman and the peacoat. She enrolls in classes with names such as "Constructed Worlds." But it's her world that's being constructed, via a group of magnetic friends and one love-laced friendship. Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman. Good thing she has about 14 Dostoyevsky titles left to go.

Where are we going? Where have we been? P. J. O'Rourke casts his gimlet gaze on the circus of clowns-people foisted on us by the 2016 election—and demands to know How the Hell Did This Happen? (Atlantic Monthly Press). Ariel Levy's life compass implodes in a time of gut-wrenching grief as she finds The Rules Do Not Apply (Random House). In his taut but haunting Exit West (Riverhead), Mohsin Hamid focuses on two lovers running toward each other as political collapse and bomb blasts scatter their city in every direction. Joan Didion's lifelong affinity for the South and West (Knopf) is exposed in these notes and fragmented essays. Here is a revealing look at the path of a national treasure. "The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan," she writes. May the road rise up to meet us all.