The Ninth Street Show is the exhibition that truly brought abstract expressionism to prominence, and men dominated the attention and the future earnings. But also featured were many women, five of whom—Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler—are the subject of Ninth Street Women (Little, Brown, $35). If it were simply a corrective to the prevailing male-focused canon, this book would be worth a look, but with biographer Mary Gabriel, you get much more. Through research pulled from diaries, letters, memoirs, and more, she brings you so close to her subjects and their coterie, every triumph feels as hard-won and bittersweet, every loss as devastating, as it must have been for them in the moment. The book is incomparable at capturing what it can mean to shoot for something that separates you from the straight and narrow, with all the joyous and upsetting complexities that brings.