Also of interest...in alternate realities

Lexicon

by Max Barry (Penguin, $27)

Max Barry has taken the power of words to a deadly new level, said Graham Sleight in The Washington Post. In Barry’s “extremely slick” thriller, an elite group of wordsmiths is trained outside Washington, D.C., to commandeer people’s minds through language. Readers may struggle early on to follow dueling plots about a girl recruit and a boy fleeing the organization. But Barry’s “corrosive wit” and insights about coercion make his book, “for all its chases and guns,” morally probing.

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William Shakespeare’s Star Wars

by Ian Doescher (Quirk, $15)

This literary mashup from a young Shakespeare fan “will likely go down in history as more of a quirky addition to the genre-busting canon than a classic,” said Maricela Gonzalez in Entertainment Weekly. A version of the original Star Warsstory told as if Shakespeare had created Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and scripted their lines in verse, it offers “some delightfully meta moments.” Even so, the story just isn’t gripping enough without the visual thrills of light-saber duels and laser battles.

The Humans

by Matt Haig (Simon & Schuster, $25)

Matt Haig isn’t the first author to use a narrator from outer space to have fun deconstructing humans’ strange ways, said Harry Ritchie in The Guardian (U.K.). But while the conceit isn’t new, Haig “uses it superbly” in this wry tale about an intergalactic traveler who assassinates a professor, inhabits his body, and then goes soft before completing his mission. “It’s a mark of how funny and clever the rest of his novel is” that Haig “just about gets away” with getting a bit mushy himself.

This Is How You Die

(Grand Central, $18)

It’s “no particular surprise” that the creators of the self-published best seller Machine of Death have released a sequel, said Tasha Robinson in the A.V. Club. What’s remarkable about this anthology of stories—all submitted by online readers of Dinosaur Comics—is that it’s better still. Again, each tale is premised on the notion that a device has been invented that predicts how each user will die. But where previous stories relied on “O. Henry–style twists,” these branch out in rewarding new directions.