Paul Lisicky, whose new book, “The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship,” has drawn an inordinate amount of praise and attention, including the full treatment from The New York Times (a weekday review followed by one in the Sunday supplement a month later), has won a Guggenheim fellowship. The category is creative arts, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s website, with general nonfiction listed as his field of study. 

One hundred and seventy-five fellowships were awarded earlier this month, chosen from among almost 3,000 applicants. The fellowships are intended as an encouragement for further work from those who have already established themselves as artists, writers, and scholars. In Mr. Lisicky’s case, he will work on “Stay: A Memoir of Provincetown,” which is about his time there in the early 1990s, when he was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and the AIDS epidemic was at its worst. 

“Many of those who lived in town were already ill,” he says on the website, “having come from other places to spend their last years in a supportive community, on a narrow strip of land surrounded on three sides by water.”

Mr. Lisicky lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the M.F.A program in creative writing at Rutgers University’s Camden, N.J., campus. Until his divorce from the poet Mark Doty a few years ago, he spent summers and weekends in Springs.

“Here’s the Thing”

Dan Giancola 

Street Press, $15 

The persona of Dan Giancola’s “Here’s the Thing” has been around the block and then some.

The book’s title establishes the hip persona whose contemporary clichés are a cover-up for dealing with a dark world. Whether speaking through the mind of “Mister Sister,” boldly introducing a layer of ambiguity in its gender fluidity, or in his ironic, jaundiced voice, the view is bleak. Mr. Giancola, who sees the world as fundamentally disordered, addresses its mundanity in a surreal everyday as “sushi rolls off the table, putting waiters in a snit,” celebrates ways “to spend the last dollar,” and boasts, “My pad don’t look too slummy.” 

Underneath this comic braggadocio lies the true subject of “Here’s the Thing”: illness and death. References to both abound. 

Mr. Giancola expresses our inevitable confrontation with death most explicitly in his long poem sequence “An Ordered Tour Through the Chaotic Mind of Mister Sister,” which is the heart of the book: 

Mister Sister’s terminal (ain’t we all?) 

but acclimating nicely (Thank You

very much) to the idea of dying. Stall

all you want but your day’s coming too.

His puns, besides showing off, mitigate the pain of our mortality. The overriding tone of the poems is that of the court jester who, underneath his jests, conveys the truth that we will die. 

Mr. Giancola is in fact a shameless punster with references to poets such as Wallace Stevens: “the Supreme Friction enjoys / its own dissolution.” He tempers his vaudeville humor with dictums that stand alone as stark truths, as in these lines from “Sunken Drive”: “We have to work at happiness”; “Age is the change we feel most keenly / its inevitability & our mustering a poor fight,” and this with its wonderful simile of passage: “We all know the years pass like boxcars.”

“An Ordered Tour Through the Chaotic Mind of Mister Sister” also provides a commentary on the art of poetry, the poet’s love and frustration. He writes of the Muse: “Because she provides nothing but doubt / doggerel and despair, Mister Sister broke / it off with the Muse, throwing her out / on her ass where she lingered to smoke / saying, you need more ambition.” Even the Muse ages, no longer providing fresh images and bringing “the usual dreck — a list / poem, a rhapsodic ode that lies / about love no better than a Hallmark / card, an angry political sonnet / elegies for people gone yet / not forgotten. . . .”

The Muse tells Mister Sister, “I’m gonna make you wish you never heard of rhyme. / Remember, I made Miss Moore dislike it!” The reference to Marianne Moore, another allusion to modernist poets, tells us how much Mr. Giancola is invested in poetry and its tradition even as his poetics rebel against them. For example, unconventionally he uses the letters of the alphabet from A to Z rather than numbers for each of the sequence’s sections.

Mr. Giancola’s persistent use of rhyme contributes to the book’s jauntiness while serving as another defense against despair. Frequent enjambment also serves this purpose while pronouncing at the same time how clever the speaker is in spite of the odds against virtuosity holding back the dark. His use of the ampersand provides an echo of Black Mountain and Beat poets to break through traditional poetry’s conventions as well as life’s conventionality.

In between his joking and his tough guy stance, Mr. Giancola reveals poignant feelings. For example, “Nothing’s lonelier than an unfinished poem”; and from the poem “Glib Yak”:

You can rob & tax me, jail & assail

me, sicken & doubt me, withhold my ale

but don’t tell me how to feel.

The last poem, “Loopy,” sums up the philosophic attitude of “Here’s the Thing” as the poet dispenses advice to the reader in an old-fashioned homily juxtaposed against his idiosyncratic voice:

Can’t you see it’s true?

You know what I mean.

No world we’re part of wants us

so it’s best to make our own.

Life’s re-runs leave you loopy.

Karma goes around like flu.

Dignity is all that’s left.

Faking happiness will kill you.

Death warrants arrive postpaid.

Best to keep small beneath the sky.

You’re gone now, buddy

& no asking why.

As Bette Davis famously said in “All About Eve,” “Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy night.” So, too, the reader of Dan Giancola’s “Here’s the Thing” will experience an uncomfortable journey through diverse poetic strategies: street talk, contemporary clichés, philosophizing, in-your-face rhymes, and puns. And well worth it.

Carole Stone’s new collection of poems is titled “Late.” A professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, she lives part time in Springs.

Dan Giancola teaches English at Suffolk Community College and lives in Mastic. His collections of poems include “Songs From the Army of Working Stiffs” and “Powder and Echo: Poems About the American Revolutionary War on Long Island.”

She may be “the best-selling author of 23 novels,” as the promotional materials say, but did you know Jodi Picoult wrote five issues of Wonder Woman for DC Comics? Just one tidbit from the Nesconset native’s long and successful writing career, which began with getting two short stories into Seventeen magazine while she was still at Princeton. 

And now her latest novel, “Leaving Time,” has been selected for the yearly Long Island Reads mass book group, one gathering of which will take place at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Refreshments will be served at the discussion, which is limited to 18 participants, so registration in advance is required. Those looking to put together their own book groups can find guides for doing so at the library’s website. 

The talk will include a screening of parts of a documentary about elephants — in the novel, the protagonist’s mother vanishes from a sanctuary where she had been studying grief among the giant beasts. A search involving a down-on-her-luck psychic and a hard-bitten private investigator ensues.

Seeing, in April, hostas unfurl like arias,

and tulips, white cups inscribed with licks of flame,

gaze feverish, grown almost to my waist,

and the oaks raise new leaves for benediction,

I mourn for what does not come back: the movie theater —

reels spinning out vampire bats, last trains,

the arc of Chaplin’s cane, the hidden doorways —

struck down for a fast-food store; your rangy stride;

my shawl of hair; my mother’s grand piano.

My mother.

     How to make it new,

how to find the gain in it? Ask the sea

at sunrise how a million sparks

can fly over dead bones.

From Grace Schulman’s 2013 collection, “Without a Claim.” Ms. Schulman, who lives part time in Springs, will be awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for lifetime achievement on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the National Arts Club in Manhattan.

“The Saltwater Frontier”

Andrew Lipman

Yale University Press, $38

There are several historians who have given those of us who reside on the end of Long Island a series of enlightening books that examine epochs from our past with careful scholarship and surprising conclusions. Within the last 20 years, these authors have unearthed remarkable documents that open up what was once a foggy past obscured by folklore, misconceptions, and Eurocentric posturing. 

I am thinking of Kathleen Bragdon’s “Native People of Southern New England, 1665-1775,” David Goddard’s “Colonizing Southampton,” Katherine Howlett Hayes’s “Slavery Before Race,” Faren R. Siminoff’s “Crossing the Sound,” and anything by Karen Ordahl Kupperman or John Strong.

Andrew Lipman, a professor at Barnard College, has written such a book. His “The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast” gives the reader an intriguing and ingenious story that follows along the East Coast from Plymouth, Mass., tracing the Connecticut shore to Manhattan. The author’s territory continues on to Long Island’s North Shore and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, while stopping at the tip of Cape Cod. And, since this book is about water, everything in between.

In his introduction, Mr. Lipman clearly focuses on a major blind spot in most American history publications. These books and articles have tended to see the natives standing on shore while the foreigners looked at them from huge floating ships. Earlier writers construed the invasion as one-sided: the Europeans on the ocean and the locals in the woods. The power was seen unfairly as totally in the fists of the armor-clad white warriors. 

But the Indians were just as much mariners and warriors as were the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish. Indeed, both cultures learned from each other about the best ways to use the saltwater highway to their advantage. In the beginning, it was often unclear who did in fact have the upper hand. This sense of lack of control kept both parties always on edge.

Mr. Lipman starts his first chapter by examining the Indian story of creation. This mythic tale is drenched in seawater. We are introduced to a great giant who splashes about the waters from the Hudson River to Pleasant Bay on Cape Cod. He grabs whales and braises them for his morning meal. While enjoying his tobacco, he creates Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard from the ashes he empties from his pipe. When he becomes angered by biting crabs or an annoying wife, other islands are created or whole schools of sea life are transported. 

He was not the only deity in the deep waters, but it was this colossus who, before vanishing into the sea, sculpted the irregular Connecticut shoreline and the collection of islands that became home to our native people.

Mr. Lipman sees a strong relationship between this cranky giant (called Weetucks by the Pequots, Mohegans, and Narragansetts) and the great glacial knife blade that scraped over our land some 25,000 years ago during the last ice age. It, too, was a sculptor. It formed Long Island and played about with the topography with as much energy and creativity as Weetucks.

The amazing environment that was left by the giants of nature and the gods became a coastal collection of lively neighboring societies that fished, planted, and enjoyed a rich life. These people explored and mapped their world. They entertained guests from the south (who likely introduced corn to the area’s diet), north, and west. They hunted the wetlands and forests for food. Wives and husbands were sometimes from away. This was a connected culture that used canoes (some of impressive size) to maintain trade and communication. And yes, there were disagreements and bloodshed.

Into this world sailed an apocalypse. Henry VII had Capt. John Cabot sail to Newfoundland in 1497. The French sent Verrazzano out to explore in 1524, and Bartholomew Gosnold told his English sponsors about the riches he had seen from his ship in 1602. The Dutch hired Henry Hudson to search for a water route to the East in 1609. The adventure started slowly, but by the early 1630s both the Dutch and the English were building their colonies, the Dutch to the west up and down the Hudson River and the English along the eastern coast stretching from Plymouth both north and south.

The author gives us an excellent introduction to the follies of both enterprises. Though the Dutch seemed to be the most wrongheaded in their approach to dealing with the Indians, the English were not far behind in their entitled attitude toward a civilization that was merely in their way.

The English and Dutch boats were far too large and cumbersome when it came to maneuvering in and out of the many small coves off the south shore of Connecticut. First the English stole native canoes because they were perfect (if tippy) for their use. But soon the Indians were manufacturing them, in great numbers, to sell to the foreigners. And natives even began to build larger boats for themselves that were based on the Dutch and English vernacular forms.

This book is centered on Long Island Sound and clearly relies on the ancient town records of East Hampton and Southampton to help illuminate the roles played by both the colonists and the natives (Montauketts, Shinnecocks, and Corchaugs) in their conflicts. Lion Gardiner and Wyandanch are carefully presented as important actors in this drama. Gardiner’s understanding of the respect due the sachems as well the adoption of some of the more brutal aspects of Indian surrender (gifting the head of a murdered enemy) clearly were vital to the English side. I should note that the author assures us that neither side was bloodier than the other. The tradition of whaling and wampum is particularly well explained. 

The Europeans began to get more aggressive in their desire to contain the native population and restrict their use of the traditional fishing and hunting grounds. In Southampton, the Indians’ dogs were shot because they bothered the colonists. Soon the settlers were taking the Indians’ farming tools away from them because their hoes and rakes could become weapons. War was inevitable.

Though we know how the story ends, we really have never been shown in detail the steps that led to the end of the nations of natives who populated our part of the world. Andrew Lipman has produced an important volume that traces the understandings and misunderstandings of this vital chapter in Long Island history. The battles on land and sea are carefully balanced with the technology of the time, but this fable is mixed with tragic relationships that were built and smashed by human greed and ideology. 

This is a fascinating and real story that is written in an enlightening and intelligent style. It is very approachable and certainly engaging. It is also one of the saddest chapters of our history.

Richard Barons is the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society. He lives in Springs.

In March “The Saltwater Frontier” won the Bancroft Prize for books about American history.

“Catechism”

Antje Katcher

Three Mile Harbor Press, $15

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again . . .

— “Ash-Wednesday,”

T.S. Eliot

“Catechism” is a collection of poetry by Antje Katcher, posthumously selected by the poet’s publisher, Paul Genega of Three Mile Harbor Press. It is a collection full of ceremony — a biblical, mythological, and personal tribute to Ms. Katcher’s greater body of artistic work. After a career as a financial analyst, she translated business documents from German to English. It is her poetry, however, that we remember her by today.

Ms. Katcher wrote under the influence of liturgical teaching and seemed to inherit the wind of its philosophical underpinnings and ineffable proofs. She blends themes from the Judeo-Christian tradition with motifs from other world religions, while examining familiar refrains and quoting popular prayers. Complex theological arguments get parsed in deft tercets. Elegiac stanzas question the reality of God’s existence. The literal origins of faith receive the full treatment.

Your kingdom come!

What does it mean? Beware of what you ask —

There is blood in the wine

Raptures and virgins, grapes and mustard seeds,

Prayers and exploding plastics, everywhere they cry:

Your kingdom come!

And in the name of the all merciful

This is the day of judgment!

There is blood in the wine

Or are we simply blind

Looking for signs and miracles while praying

Your kingdom will come

When it is here — if we would but let it emerge

Among — within — us would there still

Be blood in the wine?

These are lines from “Catechism,” the book’s title poem. As you can see, poets do not always play nice with their epistemology, and Ms. Katcher does much to keep her work from turning into paroxysm. It’s as if there were no honest way to fully unpack a prayer without getting a bit down and earthly. Her textual analysis and biblical references become their own form of artistic worship, sourced from a wordless beyond to remind us that raptures and virgins, prayers and exploding plastics really do have something in common. 

“Catechism,” the collection, consists of three sections, and by the end of Part I, our poet yearns to return to the things of this world. Part II starts to sing about a more earthly apotheosis: to be devoured, consumed, enjoined with life as we know it. Wouldn’t you like to feel the bliss of a blessed union, rather than merely contemplate it? Ms. Katcher shines when she breaks from theology and roots her language in the familiar. Her lines take on a breathlessness, urging without pause to address the flesh:

Yes, even that would be better, even pain

and bleeding if it was felt by my body

as mine — far better than eternal numbness

endless captivity within these thoughts . . .

In “Ophelia Incarnated Addresses the Bard,” the hesitancy to leave the known, to depart for something potentially greater, has been abandoned. As strange as it may be to have a body, the poem serves to answer the madness of ambivalence, whether it be personal or religious in origin. 

Part II of the collection dives into gods, myths, and ancestors, calling out the overlords in unselfconscious tones. The poet recalls her grandfather with touching clarity, and fearlessly asserts her own self in “Cherries,” a poem about her mother and grandmother.

. . . for once we’re at one,

hands stained with bloodblack fruit

passing cups to each other

cherries and pits, to fill and empty

pitting with the same rhythm

when the old woman reaches out

makes me earrings out of twin cherries

laughs softly just for a moment

and the cool under my earlobes

suddenly makes me feel grand

like a painted lady.

Part II of “Catechism” is richer, melodic, comfortable with juxtapositions of heaven and earth. Ms. Katcher writes about the Frisian Islands, and other “bright yellow islands,” as if liberated from the futile dilemma of what is holy. Things finally just happen, without the overwrought need for explanations. Her work finds splendor in what exists, as opposed to the disengaged torment of what may be, and establishes a deeper, more peaceful abode.

It’s as if the struggle to comprehend religion is somehow inherited, for when the poet abandons it, she produces her most peacefully vivid work. As dogma is rejected, the disquiet fades, and Part II of “Catechism” embraces the way things are in nature. The mood shifts entirely, from query to tranquillity. The sonority of the poems at this point is startling:

    Let us sail south, fish

for the moon among the islands, find a

beach and in the shadow of banana 

trees build ourselves a fire . . .

    — then wonder why bananas

are yellow, answer ourselves because they are bananas

ask no further questions of the day.

Everything, I promise, will be perfect . . .

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is one of the best poems in the collection because of its confidence and timely prescription for happiness. Here there is no doubt about what to say or do. The poem sets up Part III of “Catechism” with a careful, nuanced bravado that is wholly welcome. The third part of the book delves further into personal history and creates a fairy tale-like atmosphere. Ms. Katcher explores memories with an idealistic eye and occasionally reverts to the platitudes of scripture for context. 

The closing poems riff on literary and historical figures, narrative pieces that lack the breadth of emotion contained in the more lyrical second section. The themes do not develop beyond the occasional vision of something more luminous, and echo the sense of an intellectual anguish quenched only by reality, something the poet Wallace Stevens also grappled with. 

“Catechism” is a work of some irony: a poet who appeared to be unsure of her place in the world and looked elsewhere for acceptance. Yet her best writing says it all; clearly her home was here, all along.

Antje Katcher’s poems appeared in journals and magazines including Calyx and New York Quarterly. She was a resident of Springs and died in 2014.

Lucas Hunt, formerly of Springs, is the author of the poetry collections “Lives,” “Light on the Concrete,” and the forthcoming “The Muse Demanded Lyrics.” He is the director of Orchard Literary and the founder of Hunt & Light, a publisher of poetry.­­

“Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty”

Alida Brill

Schaffner Press, $24.95

Alida Brill has impeccable timing. The assignment to review “Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty: The Memoir of a Romantic Feminist” came on March 8, International Women’s Day. And the book will be released this month amid an election cycle full of conjecture about the fate of Hillary Clinton, the first woman to launch a serious presidential campaign. This past weekend I walked by a pop-up fashion boutique in Manhattan’s meatpacking district that was celebrating “The F Word” and promoting a dialogue at #Fstandsforyou. Feminism is a river that’s running just now.

In “Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty,” Ms. Brill reflects with candor and clarity on the female icons who shaped her perspective and forged her views. She tells her story through the prism of relationships — real and imagined — with Princess Grace of Monaco, Marilyn Monroe, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem, as well as the Barbie doll, an unhappy mother, a resilient aunt, and many women writers. 

Ms. Brill opens with “When I was six, I fell in love with Grace Kelly.” As she was for many of Ms. Brill’s generation, the beautiful film star turned princess of Monaco was a powerful, intoxicating fantasy. That childhood dream, particularly the notion of being “chosen” by a prince, shadowed Ms. Brill’s ambition for much of her life. 

She was a student in Paris, an antiwar activist, married and childless by choice, then divorced, and always deeply committed to intellectual pursuits and women’s equality. 

Ms. Brill’s closest friendship was with Betty Friedan, the author of “The Feminine Mystique.” The author’s descriptions ring true to many we’ve heard — that Ms. Friedan was argumentative, self-centered, and vain. Despite the intimate tie, Ms. Brill observes Ms. Friedan with clear eyes: “For all her insights and intelligence, Betty was unable to connect the dots from her behavior to the attacks and criticisms made against her. She couldn’t own what she had done to others and often felt victimized, when in fact others felt the same or worse.”

We feel the heat of their intergenerational kinship. Ms. Friedan, who died in 2006, was more than two decades older than Ms. Brill, and they often seem more like mother and daughter than friends. Their exchanges are fierce and fiery. I wish I could have been present on those nights when they drank too much, stayed up too late, and talked about life and books on Glover Street in Sag Harbor: “[S]he could be impossible, tyrannical, controlling, larger than life, enraged, and enraging. Betty excited, inspired, and exhausted me. And sometimes she broke my heart.”

“The Feminine Mystique,” referred to as “The Book,” is omnipresent in the memoir: “But what overshadowed everything in my relationship with Betty was The Book, the text that freed my mother. ‘The Feminine Mystique’ resonated with millions of frustrated women. It has profound personal significance for me. It is an essential part of my autobiography. Friedan’s thoughts and words eased my mother’s suffering, and so I, too, was liberated.” 

Many readers will recall The Book’s impact — when they read it and how it made them feel. In 1983 as I was graduating from college, my mother gave me a copy of the 20th anniversary edition with an inscription warning that women face difficult choices about work and family, but that our decisions need not be stagnant but can grow with our desires and aspirations. I suspect many a mother and daughter have communicated with and through The Book.

Much attention is given to Ms. Friedan’s jealousy of Gloria Steinem. It’s a famous feud that clearly weighed heavily on Ms. Friedan but merits a mere mention or two in Ms. Steinem’s excellent new memoir, “My Life on the Road.”

Ms. Brill also speaks with great authority about the trials of her own life with a chronic condition and the prejudice women in pain have suffered at the hands of the largely patriarchal medical profession. Ms. Brill suffers from a rare autoimmune disease, a type that is notoriously hard to diagnose, difficult to treat, and that predominately affects women. In her author notes, Ms. Brill writes, “My adolescence and then my adulthood were interrupted by chronic illness, which gave me my understanding of fairness and unfairness, and from there feminism.”

While the content is vastly different, the thinking behind this book reminds me of Mary-Louise Parker’s recent literary debut, “Dear Mr. You,” a set of memoiristic letters that has received much acclaim. In each work the author considers herself through the experience of others, seeing herself largely as a supporting actress. It is not until the very end of “Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty” that Ms. Brill delves deeply into herself, writing about loss, gratitude, the meaning of “romantic feminism,” and love. 

The author introduces a concept, the “Slow Love Movement,” in which one develops “relationship tastebuds” and learns to “savor experiences with another. . . .” She writes, “Living as a romantic feminist won’t leave you constantly hungry to be wanted and always eager to be chosen. It will take us to attachments that are based upon authenticity, trust, and equality.” Ms. Brill’s final chapter is her most powerful.

“Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty” is not for everyone. It’s unlikely Oprah will select this memoir for her book club or that the author will retire rich from book sales. But for those of us who like to swim in the deep waters of the female experience of the last 50 years, this book is a true gift.

And, a final word I’d like to offer Ms. Brill directly:

Dear Alida, 

Though we’ve never met, your bio identifies you as a “feminist, social critic, and author.” In “Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty,” you’ve added fresh insights and broadened the feminist conversation to include the Slow Love Movement. Thank you for your intellect and courage for wearing the moniker of feminist without apology.

Sally Susman, a regular book reviewer for The Star, lives in Manhattan and Sag Harbor.

Alida Brill had a second home in East Hampton for many years. Her previous book was “Dancing at the River’s Edge: A Patient and Her Doctor Negotiate Life With Chronic Illness.” “Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty” comes out on Tuesday.

Those Guild House Writers

Curious about Guild Hall’s new Guild House and the artists in residence therein? Saturday is your chance to hear two of them read from their work: poetry by Tom Yuill, the author of “Medicine Show,” called a mix of “down-home plain speech and European high culture,” and fiction by Iris Smyles, whose “Dating Tips for the Unemployed” will come out in June.

The reading starts at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. Frederic Tuten, whose novels include “Tintin in the New World,” and Julie Sheehan, the author of several collections of poems, most recently “Bar Book,” will handle the introductions. 

Writers Conference Deadline

Speaking of Frederic Tuten and Julie Sheehan, they’re both involved in the writers conference at Stony Brook Southampton, the former as a faculty member and the latter as the director of the college’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature — and the deadline for that July 6 to July 17 conference is April 1. Applications can be completed at the college’s website. John Patrick Shanley (playwriting), Adam Gopnik (essay), and Jane Hamilton (fiction) are among the other instructors.

“The Whites”

Richard Price

Picador, $16

You’d think by now the paperback release would’ve gone the way of the rooftop aerial antenna. 

It can’t all be about convenience for air travel, can it? Consumer-friendliness, maybe? But by the time the cheaper paperback comes out, the Gorilla Grodd of retail, Amazon, has already had its way with the price point. To say nothing of the e-book.

There’s novelty, of course, a paperback’s designer often improving on the earlier cover, from look to legibility. In the case of Richard Price’s “The Whites,” a badge proclaiming it a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year” has materialized in the midst of the vintage ass-eye view of four of New York’s finest ascending concrete steps skyward.

More to the point, gone is the puzzling “Writing as Harry Brandt” addition to the byline. Enough ink was spilled about that back with the hardcover release, but in the end, if Mr. Price turns out roughly two novels a decade, there’s not only no need to mask any Stephen King-style ubiquity, there’s also no need for anonymity’s granting of license to explore genre fiction. Fiction is freedom.

And anyway, this is more than a crime novel of cops and perps, it’s a bare-knuckled story of urban America, with elemental forces at play — evil and compassion, crime and punishment, justice and vengeance, loyalty and betrayal, filial love and debilitating grief. 

Billy Graves, of the “crushed-cellophane gaze,” 16-ounce energy drinks, and Camel Lights, may be a detective relegated to the N.Y.P.D.’s Night Watch (“Man was not meant to start work after midnight — pay differential be damned”), a career trajectory begun when his errant bullet killed a kid, but in the late 1990s he ran with the Wild Geese, a group of seven young cops assigned to the worst section of the East Bronx. Hold the post-footchase beatdowns, these guys enjoyed themselves, treating their collars “like members of a defeated softball team.” Protectors, avengers, they “walked the streets like gods.”

They also, each of them, developed obsessions with cases gone wrong, with perpetrators of atrocities who escaped justice. These were their Whites, the term coming from Ahab’s mad pursuit in “Moby-Dick.”

As one character, not in the Geese, puts it, forget Christian forgiveness, “these last few years? I’m all about the God of the Jews.” 

When that kind of biblical vengeance comes a-knocking at Billy’s Yonkers door, and in the person of beefy Milton Ramos, one of his Night Watch squad’s own detectives, no less, you see how the plot thickens. 

Without giving too much away, one problem, and a big if plot-driving one in a story of such gritty, even relentless, verisimilitude, involves this hounding Fury. His motivation isn’t commensurate with his actions. Milton has suffered crushing loss, going back two decades to the mistaken-identity killing of one of his brothers and later the hit-and-run death of his wife, leading him to adopt a strategy of “long-term, indirect payback.” But that not only jeopardizes his relationship with his grade-school daugh­ter (“he loved deep if not demonstrably”), it compels him to take a baseball bat to an innocent man until we see “an ivory shard of bone that had broken through the sleeve of his shirt winking in the moonlight.”

The plot, at any rate, allows Mr. Price to do what he seems most interested in doing, burrowing into the details of modern and not-so-modern urban life, from the Cymbalta and Abilify popping of middle-aged marrieds to offhand dialogue that can read as if the author had intimate knowledge of Depression-era truckstops: “The meat’s so tough that it got up off the plate and beat the shit out of the coffee, which was too weak to defend itself.”

Such snippets and passing descriptions are the highlight, and if you’re a fan of hard times and low life, can make your heart swell: a “gappy mosaic tile floor like a piss-bum’s smile”; a cemetery is “a crowded mouthful of gray teeth, unkempt and askew.” 

And then there’s Jimmy Whelan, after 20 years on the force now a building’s super living in a converted basement utility room “utterly devoid of dignity” and with a clothesline running through it, “the most unconflicted, reasonably happy individual Billy had ever known.”

They talk. Billy may call in a chit for the protection of his family. “ ‘Be like old times,’ Jimmy said, opening the window and flicking his cigarette upward onto the sidewalk.” 

Reaching for the gutter? If anyone can explain the pleasure in such a simple line, I’m all ears. 

Richard Price lives in Harlem and Amagansett.

“The Narrow Door”

Paul Lisicky

Graywolf Press, $16

“The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship” is a narrative of comradeship and grief, of love and woe. Paul Lisicky offers an honest and sometimes raw account of his relationships with two major players in his life, and outlines the intersection of loss that marked his experience. The work takes up Mr. Lisicky’s friendship with the writer Denise Gess — a long and intimate friendship of 30 years. He describes her vitality, her magnetic quality, her passion for writing and talking about writing. 

About their relationship, he writes, “It doesn’t matter anymore that she’s straight and I’m not. See how we’ve been a little bit in love all this time, and not able to say it? But that’s the story of any friendship that lasts this long.”

This relationship is remembered alongside the dissolution of Mr. Lisicky’s marriage to M, who is initialed thus but not named, and described as a well-known poet. Eventually, Mr. Lisicky and M break up in the aftermath and shadow of Ms. Gess’s death. Throughout, there’s a powerful sense of grappling present in the writing that speaks of working through the shape and texture and dimensions of a Difficult Time.

The book is structured through a syncopated chronological flow of scenes and description. Passages within named chapters are labeled by year. The bulk of the chronology is the span from the mid-1980s, when Mr. Lisicky’s friendship with Ms. Gess began, through to her death in 2009 and the end of his relationship with M in 2010. However, the years do not proceed in chronological order. Instead, they switch and repeat in an unpredictable pattern. 

The structure of the book as a rearranged and re-emphasized chronology feels musical and even at times magically attuned to the rhythms of life. The mystery of friendship, the complexity of love, the textured fabric of loss. These ideas are explored and underscored as they resurface over the course of the book.

Through warmth, humor, and even through the striving of Mr. Lisicky’s narrative voice, the reader becomes allied with him, starts to feel friendship-prone, protective of him, even. For example: Two-thirds of the way through the book, Mr. Lisicky’s marriage is clearly on the rocks and M has not only taken a boyfriend on the side but effected an arrangement whereby he spends one night a week with said boyfriend while Mr. Lisicky agrees to stay elsewhere (the house in Springs or the apartment in New York, depending). What? As Mr. Lisicky’s new reader-friend, I am not okay with that. 

Anyone who cannot imagine laughing around a dinner table with Paul Lisicky would probably not be much fun, dinner party-wise or otherwise. Many would want to be in his orbit. And Mr. Lisicky is no stranger to the seduction of a sense of belonging. Indeed, an in-club vibe does emerge in the book, a sense of posturing for position within the contemporary writing scene, with the danger of name-dropping (without some of the names) present to an extent. 

Yet the pitfalls of just those vanities come into play in Mr. Lisicky’s analysis of his friendship with Ms. Gess, as well — he discusses the complex sense of competition between them as writers, the barrier it produced. He touches on the way one’s life path is connected to success, and sometimes proximity to success (examined through Ms. Gess’s affair with “Famous Writer” — it will be easy for many readers to guess the identity of this person — and Mr. Lisicky’s relationship with M, a.k.a. the well-known poet, his name also surely less than a Google away).

Mr. Lisicky’s work has a place in the growing constellation of contemporary memoirs of friendship by writers about fellow writers. (There are more than several worth considering, among them “Truth & Beauty: A Friendship” by Ann Patchett, on her friendship with Lucy Grealy, and “Let’s Take the Long Way Home” by Gail Caldwell, on her friendship with Caroline Knapp.) His work falls in the searching/striving zone, and will find favor with a variety of readers. 

This dual tale of friendship and marriage showcases the scenic quality of memory. It fluffs the material, frames it, providing display cases in which theme and memory may pause to be considered. The book serves as a model of the process of coming to understanding through remembering. Near the end, Mr. Lisicky poses a question against the backdrop of the memorial reading he organized for Ms. Gess at City College:

“What is it like to know a single human in time? That is the question that inevitably organizes our listening. There’s nothing more absorbing than thinking about all these changes over the years. It’s not that the progression is linear. It’s just that her obsessions — the twin poles of shame and grace — move like a spiral, rotating around a core.”

Remembering is not a linear process, but still exists on a timeline. Mr. Lisicky has arranged his memories. He invites us to share his understandings.

Evan Harris is the author of “The Art of Quitting.” She lives in East Hampton.

Paul Lisicky’s four previous books include “The Burning House,” a novel. He teaches in the M.F.A. program at Rutgers University’s Camden campus.