Brando Skyhorse, Take This Man (Simon & Schuster).David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (Norton).Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Crown).Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic) Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (Penguin Press).Jake Halpern, Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Melville House).

Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (The Penguin Press).Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf).Marilynne Robinson, Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (Grove).Miranda July, The First Bad Man (Scribner).Tove Jansson, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (NYRB Classics).Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead).James Hannaham, Delicious Foods (Little, Brown).William Gibson, The Peripheral (Putnam).

Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions).

Rachel Cusk, Outline (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Donald Antrim, The Emerald Light in the Air (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Sait Faik Abasıyanık, A Useless Man, translated from the Turkish by Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely (Archipelago).

We hope you’ll find many new favorites among them. With admiring nods to widely praised novels like Ali Smith’s How to Be Both and the latest installments from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, to nonfiction standouts like Lawrence Wright’s Thirteen Days in September and Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, and to celebrated films like Selma and the Oscar-winning Ida, then, here are our picks: a dozen titles each in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and art and media that appeared in the US between May 1, 2014, and April 30, 2015, joined this year by top 10 lists of both graphic works (compiled by Jared Gardner) and children’s and YA literature (compiled by Marah Gubar) from the same period, plus a tidy half-dozen brainy beach reads.

Welcome to the third annual edition of Public Picks, a selection of the books and art that most interested and excited our editorial staff over the past year. As with previous years’ Picks ( 2013, 2014), we aimed for a list that combines the best of the best with more idiosyncratic works that you may have missed.

Impressions by Aidan Koch