New books by Jhumpa Lahiri, Ed Boland and Alvaro Enrigue

IN OTHER WORDS, by Jhumpa Lahiri. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Interpreter of Maladies,” studied Italian for 20 years and moved to Rome for full immersion. This memoir — in Italian, with an English translation by Ann Goldstein, side by side — is about the “mysterious, illogical” process of making a foreign language your own. (Knopf, $26.95)

THE BATTLE FOR ROOM 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School, by Ed Boland. The author left his nonprofit job to become a public schoolteacher and make a difference. But once in the classroom, he finds himself challenged by his students’ open defiance and by their personal challenges — from drugs to abuse — outside school. Boland writes about the experience with humor and honesty. (Grand Central, $26)

SUDDEN DEATH, by Álvaro Enrigue. In this wildly surreal novel — translated by Natasha Wimmer, who also translated Roberto Bolaño — the Mexican-born author imagines a 16th century tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn. And then things really get strange. (Riverhead, $27)