NOTEWORTHY PAPERBACKS

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

WHO IS RICH? by Matthew Klam. (Random House, $17.) Rich Fischer, the protagonist of this novel of infidelity and middle age, is a cartoonist whose fame is fading. Unhappy at home, with his career coming to a slow standstill, he returns to an arts conference where he struck up an affair the previous summer. Klam, the author of the short story collection “Sam the Cat,” brings a mordantly funny touch to existentially tragic circumstances.

THE STARS IN OUR EYES: The Famous, the Infamous, and Why We Care Way Too Much About Them, by Julie Klam. (Riverhead, $16.) “I’ve always been enamored with celebrities,” the author (Matthew Klam’s sister) writes. She goes on to consider the bargains celebrities strike for fame and examines why they’ve always been objects of keen fascination: Before the Kardashians there was Antony and Cleopatra.

THINGS THAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE, by Chiara Barzini. (Anchor, $16.) In the early 1990s, Eugenia, an Italian teenager, is uprooted by her parents for the San Fernando Valley, as Los Angeles is racked by protests. “Barzini, truly a writer to watch, positions herself astride both American and Sicilian cultures, and packs this visceral book with strong sensations from both,” New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote.

THE GREAT NADAR: The Man Behind the Camera, by Adam Begley. (Tim Duggan, $16.) Begley offers a concise but satisfying biography of the 19th-century French photographer whose portraits of Parisian luminaries (Victor Hugo, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt) remain standout examples of the genre. His most significant work, from a six-year stretch, combines “an almost sculptural force of composition and lighting with an acute psychological penetration unmatched in their day,” Luc Sante said in The Times.

THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN, by Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Ekin Oklap. (Vintage, $16.) A teenager’s encounter in rural Turkey with a married traveling performer reverberates throughout his life in this moody novel. Pamuk’s usual themes are on display: the East-West dialectic, the tensions between modernity and tradition, the relationship between secular and sacred, with Istanbul as both a backdrop and muse.

ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, by Sujatha Gidla. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) The author, who was born into a low caste before leaving for the United States, offers an unsettling view of how discrimination, segregation and prejudice are very much alive in contemporary India. As she writes in this poignant memoir: “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.”