From a literary or moral standpoint it is a cowardly performance: fiction used to disguise a message, without regard for the abstract rights of the novel as a specialized form of literature.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. “We live in an age of human self-contempt,” George Packer wrote this week.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell--and the ones we don't--shape our realities.