Montauk. It’s all the rage. But there’s cool Montauk, day-tripping Montauk, partying Montauk, and then there’s a somewhat more authentic Montauk, exemplified by the grizzled veterans of the fish-stinking rocky promontory who’ve put their literary heads together to come up with an anthology celebrating the place. 

Hot off the Harbor Electronic Publishing press, “On Montauk” is edited by Ed Johann of the Montauk Writers Group and Celine Keating, whose latest novel is “Play for Me” and who will host a group reading on Sunday at 2 p.m., in situ, as it were, at the hamlet’s A Tale of Two Sisters bookshop. Contributors taking part are community activists like Bill Akin, residents of legendary status like Perry Duryea III, and writers perhaps familiar from their work in the pages of The Star, like Debbie Tuma and Gert Murphy. Dave Davis? Alice Kaltman? David Phenix? They’ll be there. 

But wait. There are 50 or so contributors of essays, fiction, and poetry. What about the rest of them? Take note, more such gatherings are coming down the pike this summer, from the East Hampton Library to Southampton Books to Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, and each will have a rotated cast of readers. 

Stay tuned.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

       — from “Gerontion” by T.S. Eliot

While it is a truth that anyone who lives to old age will experience inevitable deterioration, the facts of each case go universally unacknowledged. The personal reality of decline is hard to express, takes time away from life itself, and conflicts with the abundance narrative — youth, marriage, sex, and childbirth are more celebrated. Who wants to dwell on death?

“Orphans” (CavanKerry Press, $18) is a verse memoir about just that. It is a story told in poetry with a combination of quiet daring and mundane development. The book consists of crisp free verse elevated to the heights of prosaic narrative, but the details are of particular significance. It’s about what it means to lose a mother and a father, and how those losses foreshadow others. If our parents can die, then anyone can.

T.S. Eliot wrote about “The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.” Joan Cusack Handler has as well, yet her account of the thing contains a specificity Eliot barely intimated. “Orphans” is divided into equally poignant halves. The first is about the life and times of the poet’s mother, Mary O’Connor Cusack, and consists of more numerous, shorter pieces. The second is about the poet’s father, Eugene Cusack, and made up of fewer, more lengthy pieces. Ms. Handler is honestly fearless in these exploratory memorials to her parents.

The theme of “Orphans” turns something rather rare into something very familiar. While you may not have been born an orphan, you will most likely become one. The double fortune of having parents turns into a double grief when they pass. It’s terrible and ordinary all at once.

One by one, we came,

each emerging from her dark appraisal — for there was

nothing of that harsh branding now. All guile gone —

abundant words of each one’s worth.

It took till she was dying

for her to know we loved her.

This is from the fifth section of a long poem titled “Inoperable.” It’s especially touching as the poet’s mother is the suffering type to begin with. Her personality gets undermined by self-doubt to the degree that she victimizes her own family. Their genuine desire to support her in a time of great adversity is thrown back. The poet reveals the truth of the matter, while struggling to come to grips with her mother’s painful experience. 

The poet identifies with her mother, and the writing is dramatic, yet tensionless. It’s daunting to care for the terminally ill, let alone put it into words. Ms. Handler’s poems are often composed in concrete forms. Concrete poetry shapes words on the page into images of recognizable things. While some poets make exact resemblances, such as a poem about pyramids shaped like a pyramid, “Orphans” depicts angelic forms dancing page to page. The poems turn and twist, gyrate and drill into the earth as they rise. The use of concrete forms here is striking, almost violent in a gentle manner.

While “Orphans” does much to further a compassionate narrative toward the old and the dying, it falters in literary achievement. The challenge of emulating a prose memoir is that the story needs movement. The progression from poem to poem here achieves intimacy, but sacrifices lyrical expression while fruitlessly reaching for epic structure. There is little redemption beyond the page. Still, the endeavor is praiseworthy for keeping it real.

Help me find a way to

like her. We deserve it.

I want to respect her.

I want to be able to hold her

when she needs me to. I want to

look into her eyes when she is dying.

I want to give her that.

I want not to look away.

This is from “Lately,” a piece about the failing health of the poet’s mother. It’s an incredibly personal example of the journalistic narrative in “Orphans.” Many reminiscences in the book are successfully infused with voiced interjections by her parents themselves, as if their commentary were never far from mind. Ms. Handler’s account is sporadic and tends toward the anecdotal. However, it gathers force and cohesion toward the second half of the book, which details her father’s demise.

It happened when we got the diagnosis.

Resentment suddenly gone;

only love left — each of us standing in line.

This passage is also from “Inoperable” and portends what we realize is inexpressible. The merit of the work is manifold. With procedural courage, the poetry faces a kaleidoscope of pain while staring at the scars of emotional truth. If language is a running commentary on our broken-down story, who doesn’t want it to pulse with new life?

The second half of “Orphans” is most notable. It is at once laconic, conversational, and rambling, yet empathetic to generational decay. No one is exempt from the conflict. Absence affects us in ways we cannot comprehend. Accidents and injuries dictate our existence in the end. Most of us would like to forget, or at least move on from, the collective fear of death. But here we remember our mother and father. 

When did it happen

that the future started

to darken,

shrink,

pick up speed in that 

final sprint that will wipe out all

love from my life?

(A passage from the penultimate piece in the collection, “The Poem.”)

Lucas Hunt is the author of the poetry collections “Lives,” “Light on the Concrete,” and “Iowa,” which is forthcoming. Formerly of Springs, he is the director of Orchard Literary and the founder of Hunt & Light, a publisher of poetry.

Joan Cusack Handler’s books include “Confessions of Joan the Tall,” a memoir. She lives in East Hampton and New Jersey.

“Back Lash”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $29

Chris Knopf has left the fabulous Hamptons behind for the browner pastures of the Bronx. In “Back Lash,” the seventh installment in what is the original of his several series of crime novels, the geographically pretentious reference has even been excised from the cover, the billing simply reading “A Sam Acquillo Mystery.”

For the best, it seems. Case in point, what might be most appealing about North Sea, the least “Hamptons” hamlet out here, and which Mr. Knopf describes as “the woody area above Southampton,” is its proudly unimproved rumrunners’ network of dirt roads. Our hero, who keeps a cottage there on Little Peconic Bay, where he likes to sit in an Adirondack chair, look at the water, and think on things, does little more than check in on the place as he shuffles the mean streets, chasing leads having to do with the decades-old men’s room beating death of his father.

That scene not only opens the book, it’s its most vivid, as the short-fused French Canadian auto mechanic of Italian extraction settles in with the usual, a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top, a shot of whiskey, and a Miller High Life to nurse while he lingers over his Daily News, folded in quarters for one-handed reading. By the 1970s this borough bar devoid of all niceties had been darkened with age to the point that its woodwork, “a deep mahogany, soaked up what little natural light got through.” 

In other words, it’s as dark as the Bronx’s Mother of Divine Providence Church, only more frequented. Inside that “giant pile of European architecture” rising from the wrecked neighborhood “like a forgotten fortress,” Mr. Knopf writes, the gloom “was dense enough to cup in your hands.” Deep in its recesses Acquillo finds meaty Nelson Cleary. Bear-like in his priestly black, he stands conflicted at a crossroads of family histories and plotlines, what with one brother on the City Council and another in journalism, and having given shelter and housecleaning employment to a woman who’d started a second, secret family with Acquillo senior. 

But enough of that. These settings become like characters unto themselves — a main reason that readers, or this reader, anyway, are drawn to crime fiction, as with Elmore Leonard’s matchless Detroit novels of the late ’70s, gritty, bare-bones, before Hollywood got to him, or Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder, forever killing time in coffee shops and deserted pews. 

Sam Acquillo by his own admission lacks many of the more admirable character traits, like patience, so he doesn’t exactly sit around as Scudder did, though you can catch him feeling his breast pocket for a phantom pack of smokes, or sipping bitter coffee on his cheap room’s balcony, so small the chair sits sideways, “staring out at the hotel’s cramped parking lot and the ragged storefronts across the street.” 

An M.I.T. grad and former hydrocarbon-processing engineer (hey, someone’s gotta do it), he can also be found pontificating with some insight during his adventures among the cops, perps, accomplices, and informants. On technology, perhaps most memorably, fearing its addictiveness, the “hypnotic pull” of the screen, finally relenting and nagging a librarian into helping with his first Google search of the digital ether, ridiculing his subsequent time spent “messing around on the computer like the rest of the American population” — he considers cigarettes a safer habit.

“You know who’s hard to find on Google?” he’s asked.

“An honest man?” he answers. 

Acquillo’s father was an angry man, known to toss a wrench at his son’s head over a difference of opinion about car repair. So Sam plows into the investigation out of innate curiosity, not affection or vengeance-seeking, and in light of the experiences of his girlfriend, who never knew her father, and his cohort in the cold-cases bureau, whose old man committed suicide when she was 18, he comes to see himself as “caught in a conspiracy, conceived by a cabal of dead fathers, each having left children behind to be tormented by their mysteries, their sins against innocence and adoration.” 

Heavy stuff, Sam, good thing that dead father left you a little refuge by the bay out in the sticks. Pet your dog, kiss your girlfriend. Biology is not destiny.

Chris Knopf lives part time in Southampton. 

“We Gather Together”

Neil J. Young

Oxford University Press, $34.95

Especially in a presidential election year such as this one, it is timely and interesting to delve into the backgrounds of the forces that are shaping the political scene. Neil J. Young has given us a detailed and thought-provoking history of one of those movements in “We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics.”

Mr. Young, who has taught at Princeton University, did a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University that looked at the religious right from 1972 to 1984. He knew intuitively that there was much more to the story, and this led him to greatly expand and revise his dissertation into the book. 

“We Gather Together” shows that, contrary to popular thought, the religious right did not suddenly rise up as a unified group in the 1970s in response to Roe v. Wade, the Equal Rights Amendment, or similar developments. Rather, he goes back to the 1950s, when there was a liberal ecumenical movement growing among mainline Protestants and liberal Jews, and shows that Catholics, Mormons, and evangelicals cautiously formed alliances to resist it, even though they viewed one another with great suspicion and animosity.

The religious right is often seen as a monolithic group, and it certainly gives that impression in the political arena. But although it was brought together by cultural and political concerns, from the very beginning the coalition has been beset by problems, has been fragile, contentious, and even combatant, with huge theological and religious differences.

The terms evangelical and fundamentalist are often used interchangeably, and indeed there is some overlap. Mr. Young defines fundamentalists as being more conservative and much more separatist. Evangelicals, on the other hand, put themselves between fundamentalists and the liberal ecumenical movement, and have been more willing to work with each other, at least on cultural and political causes, even while they disagree on theology. 

The role of Mormons has been mentioned by others but has not been closely examined. Mr. Young is perhaps the first to put them at the center of the story, because in fact they have been prominent players in the religious right since the 1950s.

From the myriad examples of how the uneasy relationships among the various groups became a unified front, I will recount some of the story about Phyllis Schlafly, remembered for her work against the Equal Rights Amendment and against legalized abortion in the 1970s. She saw the E.R.A. as a cause to bring together conservatives, especially women, who believed the amendment would attack marriage and the roles of men and women as they were traditionally understood.

What may not be so well remembered is that Ms. Schlafly was a Catholic from Illinois, and at first these issues were seen by others as largely Catholic issues. Some evangelical leaders and publications were speaking against the legalization of abortion, notably Christianity Today, the magazine founded by the evangelist Billy Graham in the 1950s. However, many lay evangelicals and clergy were ambivalent toward the issue, for fear of being identified too closely with Catholicism.

In a highly unusual move, Ms. Schlafly became the first Catholic invited to speak from the pulpit of the televangelist Jerry Falwell at his Thomas Road Baptist Church, where she gave a talk on the E.R.A. At about the same time, the Mormon Brigham Young University also invited Ms. Schlafly to give a similar speech on the same subject; it was an extremely rare appearance of a Catholic at a Mormon institution. These were two events that seemed to show a unity between the various groups and helped to push the movement into the forefront.

But Mr. Falwell once revealed a good bit of truth as he quipped to a reporter, “When Mormons, Catholics, Jews, and Protestants come together you’d have a bloodbath if it weren’t political. We’re willing to fight for a common cause, so we can fight with each other later.” Though he was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, he was referring to a deep-seated fear of each group that the others would eventually grow large or powerful enough to overrun the rest.

Other areas covered in the book include the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the complex subject of school prayer, the Moral Majority, the surge of growth in the Mormon Church, and the religious right’s relationship with President Reagan.

“We Gather Together” has put a spotlight on the religious right, in order to help us understand more deeply one of the forces shaping our national scene today. I would like to see a similar look at the liberal ecumenical movement, which was originally the catalyst for the religious right. It seems that this group, which comes together in national political effort, is a major but often overlooked force today.

At the same time, the narrative shows that while various leaders often come together on national issues, there is a disconnect because the laity is actually quite varied and diversified. Apropos the current political scene, Mr. Young has said in an interview elsewhere that while most evangelical leaders actively oppose Donald Trump’s candidacy, he is supported by large numbers of evangelical voters.

Mr. Young concludes that the religious right will continue in much the same way, its members working together on shared political goals, but also having very deep commitments to their own brand of theology and quite literally working to convert each other.

“We Gather Together” has a scholarly bent. It quotes extensively from various books, magazines, documents, memos, and speeches, and there are some 90 pages of notes. Considering the wide scope of the material and its historical value, perhaps an index would have been a helpful tool.

With this attention to detail, Mr. Young not only weaves a strong and convincing narrative, but many of the personalities and events come alive. “We Gather Together” is a very fine read for those seeking to add great depth and many dimensions to their perspective of the religious right and how it shapes today’s political stage.

Thomas Bohlert, a music and book reviewer for The Star, lives in Springs.

Neil J. Young has a house in East Hampton.

“A Hero of France”

Alan Furst

Random House, $27

Of contemporary spy novelists, Alan Furst is the undisputed king of historical espionage. The majority of his 14 novels are set in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s, dealing primarily with the machinations of resistance fighters and spies — with a love affair or two thrown in for good measure. At their best they are atmospheric and suspenseful, occasionally lyrical, and often infused with a dash of erotic heat; Mr. Furst is the rare contemporary novelist who writes well about sexuality. 

This is at least partially due to the time period; sex circa World War II is much less tricky than what faces the novelist working in a contemporary setting, where one must navigate a complicated postfeminist universe. Nevertheless, Mr. Furst seems to have a genuine Updikean eye for naughtiness. 

You get a little taste of this right away in Mr. Furst’s new novel, “A Hero of France,” which takes place in Paris in 1941 during the German occupation. In an early scene, Mathieu, a French Resistance fighter, slips into a seedy nightclub to meet with the owner, Max de Lyon, who wants to aid the cause. And wouldn’t you know it? During the meeting a can-can audition is taking place where a bevy of young women in bra and panties are trying to impress a randy stage director. Who will be the lucky girl? De Lyon already knows: “The one on the left with the big behind — the German soldiers are partial to big behinds.” After a visit to the men’s room with the director, her job is secured. C’est la vie.

The nightclub scene may remind some readers of Eric Ambler, the 20th-century English novelist whose spies always seemed to find the most squalid bars and boites to do their business. Though they are often mentioned as literary cousins, Mr. Furst doesn’t have Ambler’s knack for lurid nostalgia, nor do Mr. Furst’s characters have the psychological complexity of those of other thriller writers such as Graham Greene or John le Carré, to whom he is also compared. 

What Mr. Furst does have is a deceptively breezy prose style to go along with propulsive storytelling instincts that make his books eminently readable. “A Hero of France” is no exception. In this panoramic, if slight, tale of the French Resistance, sentences fly by with the greatest ease; you suddenly awake from your reverie to find that you’ve knocked back 50 pages when you’d thought you’d read 20. This, I would argue, is the foundation of Mr. Furst’s success, something akin to the dancers of de Lyon’s nightclub: He gives pleasure. 

At the same time, “A Hero of France” is disparate and episodic. The beginning of the novel mostly follows Mathieu as he helps downed British airmen escape into Spain, and with the introduction of Major Broehm — a German intelligence officer determined to crush this part of the Resistance — you think the novel is set up for a matching of wits culminating in a grand showdown. But Mr. Furst can’t stop adding characters — an old lover of Mathieu’s, a restaurant owner, a nerdy Nazi sympathizer, a determined German civil servant, a teenage Resistance fighter — all of whom begin plotlines of their own, some of which are loosely developed, others that go nowhere. In the midst of this muddle, we lose track of Mathieu, and the narrative backbone goes limp. 

There are lively scenes, of course, such as when Mathieu and his team commandeer a butcher’s truck to transport more downed airmen and end up in a firefight with a German patrol. There’s more erotica too, as when the wife of a wealthy member of the Resistance sunbathes nude as an invitation to either Mathieu or his female counterpart — though more likely both. (Sadly for the reader, she is to be disappointed.)

At a certain point, though, you may begin to wonder if anything is really at stake in “A Hero of France.” Yes, there are arrests in the novel, serious wounds, and even death. But over all things go pretty rosy for these Resistance fighters. Even Broehm himself seems innocuous; instead of brutal interrogation, this commandant practices a technique of reason and subtle pressure with his prisoners that seems out of step with what is generally understood about Nazi methods. Certainly it is out of step with creating fictional tension and urgency. In this novel, the only power Broehm wields with his captured prisoners is the power of suggestion.

The ending is a flurry of quick summaries as the author tries to tie up all his threads into neat little bows. Some of the vignettes are amusing; others are so cursory you won’t much care (you never really knew the character anyway). As the novel ended I couldn’t help think of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”: There too you have a hero taking on Fascists as a Resistance fighter, but everything is played for much higher stakes, and the famous ending to Hemingway’s novel is one you never forget. 

“A Hero of France,” on the other hand — while a fitting tribute to the brave women and men of the Resistance — forgets a major edict of drama: There’s no true heroism without tragedy. 

Kurt Wenzel is the author of the novels “Lit Life,” “Gotham Tragic,” and “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.

Alan Furst lives in Sag Harbor. “A Hero of France” comes out on Tuesday.

“The Lioness in Winter”

Ann Burack-Weiss

Columbia University Press, $30

“There are compensations for every decade,” my grandfather used to say, casting the specter of aging in a positive perspective. As I reach for reading glasses or cantilever myself into a yoga position, my grandfather’s words sometimes return to me. I count my compensations gratefully. Why, just last week, a miracle: I risked telling a joke at a dinner and delivered the punch line intact. In exchange for failing knees, I reason, the reward has been a little hard-won social confidence.

In the famous arrogance of youth, old age is the shore we’ll never reach. As the decades pile up, we vow to stay always connected and relevant. We choose the voodoo of healthy living to ward off illness and injury. But “age trumps all,” writes Ann Burack-Weiss in her elegiac new book, “The Lioness in Winter: Writing an Old Woman’s Life.”

“Old age is terminal,” in the words of Doris Grumbach, now nearly 100, whom Ms. Burack-Weiss quotes, “but still, I find the long habit of living hard to break.” Indeed, as they say, it’s better than the alternative.

A social work practitioner and educator, Ms. Burack-Weiss staked her claim on the field of gerontology in 1969, in grad school, to which she returned after her second child started school. “It was a heady time for social work education at Columbia University,” she reports. The “war on poverty” was on. Money available for social programs was substantial. Yet, the view that “there was nothing you could actually do with, or for, the old” prevailed. Who could picture the vital student protesters who took over Low Library as old, much less depleting the coffers of Social Security and Medicare?

Ms. Burack-Weiss claims her career choice was counterphobic. “I became a social worker with the aged because I was afraid for my life,” she confesses. “I was packing a virtual doomsday kit — shoring up resources of information and insight to sustain me when I became one of them.” 

However, data on the aging was virtually nonexistent at the time. The evolving field of gerontology — to the author’s dismay — was increasingly objectifying the aged into “activities of daily living” assessment lists matching needs to services. In a quest for information from the front, Ms. Burack-Weiss obsessively read the memoirs of women who had grown old in print. 

Nearly five decades later, the author has put a lifetime of musings into “The Lioness in Winter,” a slim and beautiful volume that is part memoir, part career-confessional, but most compellingly a collection of writings on aging from women she admires.

The professional, she owns, has lately become personal. Widowed now and in her late 70s, Ms. Burack-Weiss finds that her life is circumscribed by a fall in which she broke her pelvis. Through this book, she is teaching what she still needs to learn, she writes. Her companions are, most recognizably, Doris Lessing, Edith Wharton, Joan Didion, Maya Angelou, and Colette, among many others whose thoughts on aging will most certainly be new to many readers. 

Originally Ms. Burack-Weiss intended to create a kind of “verbal version” of the artist Judy Chicago’s iconic mid-1970s piece “The Dinner Party,” which was a table with individualized settings for 39 women who advanced women’s causes. Ultimately, though, Ms. Burack-Weiss felt she wanted to reveal the influence of each writer in a far more personal way. 

The outcome, she admits, is “a highly idiosyncratic collection,” a kind of conversation in which her thoughts are processed on the page, along with those of others. The messages are often grim. The kinds of compensations my grandfather promised are very few. The truths delivered are exactly those that make the subject of aging so unpopular: physical pain, dependence, diminishing capacities — or, if not that, then a growing sense of becoming marginalized.

“Old age is a little like dieting. Every day there is a little less of us to be observed,” wrote Ms. Grumbach nearly 20 years ago. “It differs from dieting in that we will never gain any of it back.” Reading these words, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. 

But then there is Edith Wharton’s generous optimism: “In spite of illness, in spite of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways.”

Ms. Burack-Weiss has categorized her “personal stars” by the eras in which they were born, although time, except for its inevitable passing, is not significant. On the universal subject of aging, the voices of Gerda Lerner or Vivian Gornick, while individual, speak as one. I confess I would have liked more biographical information on a few of the women who are lesser known. I can appreciate, however, that the author may have chosen not to identify her literary companions by the achievements that defined them at the peak of their lives. 

If I had a quibble, it’s that “The Lioness in Winter” fails to launch until page 43, which in a book of 160-odd pages feels significant. Is a chapter that identifies and describes the differences between autobiographical forms (i.e., memoir versus journal entry) truly needed? The lesson feels tacked on, more suited to a college freshman English class. 

At that point I began to worry that the book was an analysis of memoirs about old age in which we’d never get a taste of the original material. I rifled ahead to see what was in store.

Thereafter, though, the narrative takes off. Its broad areas of preoccupation are those that consume us all: body, identity, home, sex, death, and happiness — occasionally even shopping. “I greatly enjoy making out checks and spending money in every possible way,” wrote (or perhaps dictated) May Sarton in talking about small pleasures in her journal before her death at 83. “This is not only true of my old age; it has always been true,” she confessed. 

Ms. Burack-Weiss wonders what she or anyone can offer younger, more able people who assist the elderly, and this is followed by a description of her encounter with a drugstore attendant who has happily helped her assemble a blood pressure monitor that is beyond her capabilities. I love her answer. Maybe like Lear’s Cordelia, she concludes, she is “herself a dowry.” 

“The Lioness in Winter” is a follow-up to Ms. Burack-Weiss’s “The Caregiver’s Tale: Loss and Renewal in Memoirs of Family Life.” In both books, the work of Joan Didion acts as a kind of divining rod. “I protested her view of the aging female experience,” Ms. Burack-Weiss writes of reading “Blue Nights,” Ms. Didion’s bleak 2011 memoir about her regrets and fears of declining powers. “So hard did I protest that it would not take the insight of Shakespeare or Freud to recognize that I protested too much.”

Indeed, I myself approached “The Lioness in Winter” with one eye closed, at first resisting its more difficult truths. My objections are emphatically recorded in the margins of my copy — “No!” “Really??” “Unnecessarily negative?” But the author’s goal is not to sugarcoat the subject. After a while I stopped resisting, and the words began to resonate. 

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she notes that Ms. Didion observed. Ms. Burack-Weiss appears to have followed her own advice: “It is what it is. Get used to it. And, if you’re able — turn it into art.” 

Art abounds: in Edna O’Brien’s description of home in the “lambent light of that August evening, with the sun going down, a bit of creeper crimsoning and latticed along an upstairs window . . .” Or M.F.K. Fisher’s passage declaring that she was “completely sexually alive” for the husband who had died more than 40 years before. 

I loved this bit of drama from Diane Ackerman: “I may not live to the end of this sentence, to lift my felt-tipped pen and settle a tiny black dot on the page. I did. But that was then and this is now, the thisness of what is, the ripening dawn.” 

No slouch herself in the writing department, Ms. Burack-Weiss admits that in assembling her doomsday kit decades ago she had “packed sneakers to climb Mount Everest.” At base camp she has now gathered her friends, who tell her to love what is, find happiness in the everyday, show up for yourself, accept the kindness of strangers willingly — not new ideas, exactly, but newly inspiring in this context. 

Ellen T. White is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” an exploration of the great romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

Ann Burack-Weiss spent summers and weekends in Montauk from 1974 to 2011.

Essay Readings at Rogers

Friends, now is the time to hear your neighbors rise up and read from their workshopped essays, the result of their efforts in a class led by Carla Riccio of the Hayground School, who’s a former Dial Press editor, by the by. It starts at 2 p.m. on Saturday at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

Close readers of this paper might, in fact, be familiar with the work of at least one participant in a Riccio class — Denise Gray Meehan, whose “A Million Bucks” ran in the “Guestwords” column in March of last year. Call to register, says the library.

Home, Sweet Home, the Course

Jennifer Senft, who teaches in the English and humanities departments at Suffolk Community College, is returning to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill with a writing course designed to “explore personal and societal aspects of domesticity and the home” in what is a “companion class to the Home, Sweet Home gallery in the Parrish’s permanent collection.” It meets from 10 a.m. to noon starting tomorrow and continuing on the two Fridays following. 

Ms. Senft “will share texts from the 1950s to the present, and participants will write about their own experiences and opinions,” according to a release. The cost is $120, or $95 for museum members. Registration is with the museum by phone or online.

“Father’s Day”

Simon Van Booy

Harper, $24.99

“Think about it this way,” Jason the neck-tattooed motorcycle aficionado says to his adopted daughter in Simon Van Booy’s new novel, “Father’s Day,” explaining his lack of even one date during her two decades in his life, “I’m a single parent with no money, a dead-end job, a fake leg, bad teeth, and a criminal record. Plus I’m a recovering alcoholic. What loser could ever love a person like that?”

Good one, Dad, you just sent the only person in the world who does in fact love you bolting her chair and stumbling out onto the patio, trailing sobs. (Or something like.) 

It passes, lesson learned, and the bond grows. And this is the story of that bond, which begins as an unlikely one between a precocious little girl, Harvey, and the beer drinker and hell-raiser who gives up the bar brawls for the nearly straight and narrow so he can adopt his dead brother’s kid. All thanks to the intuition and persistence of a social worker who saw past the hard-luck facade and recognized a potentially good parent. Because parenting, perhaps above all else, requires presence. 

How does he do? Well, the two share an appreciation for TV’s “SpongeBob,” and pizza, and a certain chopper with a nickel-plated headlight and chrome tailpipes. 

“We all know about the motorcycle you’re building in the garage,” Harvey’s second-grade teacher informs Jason on parent-teacher night, which he’d prepared for by digging out his best sweatpants and Band-Aiding over his tats, “and that your tacos and meat loaf are amazing — but your chicken is a little dry, I’m afraid.”

Jason may be one of life’s losers, with anger issues he deals with by secretly banging out a quick hundred push-ups, but he’s down with what the Greeks called agape, unconditional, self-giving love. That’s the thing about hearts: You never know who will get one.

Based on no stronger evidence than having read a few short stories, one could argue that a knock against Mr. Van Booy is his sentimentality. Here, however, the author, Welsh-raised, cosmopolitan, romantic in disposition, proves adept at exploring low life, recounting, for example, how Jason, five years out of stir and on a bender, once handled curbside harassment: “in one motion explod[ing] upward, driving the metal can into the man’s face, shredding the lower part of his lip,” before head-butting his accomplice into submission.

A departure, too, is the dreary Long Island setting — Chuck E. Cheese’s, the dentist in Westbury, the bowling alley in Mineola. But Harvey, with Jason’s support, escapes, first to art school and then to a job as an illustrator in Paris, presaging her dad’s visit on the day the book’s title denotes.

“Father’s Day,” naturally, isn’t as straightforward as all that. As early as page 24 a life-altering secret is hinted at, to be revealed by way of a certain document at the end of the book, but that foreshadowing easily can and maybe should be put out of the reader’s mind, as there’s so much else to enjoy along the way, from Mr. Van Booy’s muted lyricism (“Harvey did not hear the sound so much as feel it, the way a child in the womb must feel the tolling of its mother’s heart”), to the profusion of quiet domestic moments rendered in the strangely captivating way of Andre Dubus. 

Much attention, for example, is paid to meals, the taking of and the preparation of. Jason, up while it’s still dark, puts coffee on first. “Then he heated some oil in the pan and dropped the sausages in one by one.” This for Harvey’s ninth birthday breakfast, complete with SpongeBob napkins and chocolate milk — all of it subsequently scuttled by a raging fever, one so threateningly high Jason abandons his sense of self-sufficiency, swallows his pride, and runs for help from the Hispanic family next door. 

“The ones I’m not allowed to wave at?” Harvey asks.

“Yeah, them.”

Jason likes his coffee and cigarettes out on the patio, the better to mull things over, at times with great profundity: He worries “that they might never find each other again, once this life had ended.” When he considers the dispiriting stream of daily annoyances — a toilet that won’t flush, the broken AC, no Pull-Ups — the seesaw yet rises at the thought of those other “little things, like pizza night, playing drums, and watching cartoons, that made life worth living.”

If you’ve ever wondered about the time commitment reading fiction requires — seems a mite leisurely, doesn’t it? — that’s as good an answer as any: a reminder to simply pay attention. 

Simon Van Booy is the author of two previous novels and three collections of stories. He is a past resident of the South Fork and a regular visitor.

“A Hole in the Ocean”

Sandy McIntosh

Marsh Hawk Press, $16

Stars-in-the-eyes young poet meets literary and art world icons in the Hamptons. And re-meets and reconsiders. And admires. And continues to honor and to create his own work.

Sandy McIntosh graduated from Southampton College — then Long Island University — in 1970. And along the way to his degree he had a number of encounters with artists and writers. Driving on Springs-Fireplace Road he happened upon Willem de Kooning. Well, he didn’t exactly happen upon the artist. Mr. McIntosh was driving home after his job pumping gas when a bicyclist veered here and there then tumbled over. Mr. McIntosh stopped and ran over to see a rather dazed de Kooning lying in the grass. The artist asked for a ride home — his bicycle didn’t have a light. 

He was living in a farmhouse opposite the Green River Cemetery, he said, but this was only temporary, until they finished building his new studio. “I don’t want them to finish the damn thing,” he said with some bitterness. I asked why not. “Because when it’s finished, I think I will be finished, too.”

We drove on for a few minutes until he told me to stop. “I live right here,” he said. He looked in the direction of the cemetery and pointed: “All my friends are buried over there.”

Mr. McIntosh dropped off de Kooning and his bike and crossed the road to explore Green River, finding the markers for A.J. Liebling, Frank O’Hara, Stuart Davis, and of course Jackson Pollock’s boulder, and proceeded to ponder.

“A Hole in the Ocean” feels very much like the “Hamptons’ Apprenticeship” of its subtitle, with its aha moments and stories of meetings with and musings about the famous and infamous on the East End. Mr. McIntosh notes that Southampton College has long been a magnet for a number of accomplished people. In the late ’60s people such as the performance poet and scholar Charles Matz and the poet David Ignatow, among others, clustered there.

“How had this group coalesced? According to de Kooning, ‘We’re here in the winter all alone. We work in our studios all day and some of us want to get together at night, usually at Bobby Van’s, or some other bar. Then some people get into fights — Jim Jones likes to throw punches — or get drunk and there is trouble with the police. It’s either that or we meet at the college and talk without getting into too much trouble.’ ”

Near the end of this slim volume Mr. McIntosh turns his thoughts back to Green River. “I reflected on my encounter with de Kooning years before, and had the sobering thought that in subsequent summers a tipsy artist wobbling on his bicycle on a Hamptons road would have little chance of surviving the tourist traffic, which is grim, relentless, and unforgiving. In fact, I realized that the easy access I had in my time to the wonderful artists and writers living there may no longer be possible. These days they all seem to remain cloistered in their compounds, their public appearances protected by bodyguards.”

He goes on to quote part of a poem by Harvey Shapiro:

When we were young,

and our children were young —

the water was such a mystery,

the sky so blue. Everything

breathed promise. The language

would blaze forth,

did blaze forth . . .

To the rich vacationers

our lives meant nothing.

We kept investing them with meaning

until the enterprise broke us . . .

Despite these bittersweet moments, Mr. McIntosh writes with great affection for contemporaries of his, such as the painter John MacWhinnie, as well as about the impact various art institutions, including Guild Hall, have had on the East End arts scene, and about his gratitude to the Hamptons. 

There is a deliciously droll tale in the section “One of Many Random Encounters With Truman Capote.” Mr. McIntosh had stopped in Bobby Van’s to sell advertising for his summer newspaper job. Capote was at his corner table. 

He recognized me from previous chance meetings and lifted his arm laconically to wave me over. “You must try one of these cocktails,” he said. “You see how lovely and pink mine is, like the Sargasso Sea? Sit down!”

I sat. “What’s in it?”

“Grapefruit juice with just a little splash of vodka. I enjoy one of these — only one — each day.” He waved to the waiter. “Bring this young man one of these.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m working today.”

“Pity. Always working. Well,” he said to the waiter, “you can bring me his. Can’t let this young man’s drink waste away untasted.”

In another vignette, Mr. McIntosh describes the East End literary publication The Bonacker, founded by H.R. Hays in 1953, which published well into the ’60s and featured works by Frank O’Hara, Fairfield Porter, Jeffrey Potter, and John Hall Wheelock. Once the elderly Wheelock asked the young man what he thought about his work, which Mr. McIntosh had found to be “out-of-date poesy.” 

“ ‘Don’t feel bad,’ [Wheelock] interrupted my silence. ‘I suspect you’re uneasy with the style of the poems. But you’ll miss something important if you judge the past by the present.’ ”

Wheelock then quotes T.S. Eliot. “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

Laura Wells is a regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives in Sag Harbor.

Sandy McIntosh headed up the H.R. Hays Distinguished Poets series at Guild Hall from 1980 to 2000.

After your first cup of Peet’s

you remember you can’t write

code and never could hit a curve

You can’t mobilize an army

brat and you haven’t a green

thumb to while away the rosy day

After a second cup of Peet’s

you remember you can’t deracinate

a spleen and can’t even find one

You haven’t invented anything yet-

to-be-invented and don’t know how to

monetize a good idea

After your last cup of Peet’s

you chase a wild goose

across the keyboard sky

And then settle on a nap

Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.