“Pushcart Prize XL”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $19.95

The Pushcart Prize is celebrating its 40th anniversary; 40 years of bringing us the very best new writing from America’s small presses, whose sheer passion and strength of purpose keep them afloat in the face of the multinational publishing behemoths. Celebrate is the appropriate word.

In his introduction, the collection’s editor, the endearingly curmudgeonly Bill Henderson, laments the loss of the old independent publishers and the fabled editors, the rise of vanity publishing, the disappearance of magazines and newspapers in “the insane excitement of a digital world.”

He quotes a paragraph from an essay by Leon Wieseltier, former editor of The New Republic, in The New York Times Book Review, which is worth repeating again here: “Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. . . . Words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous. . . . Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. . . .”

Mr. Henderson is a staunch holdout against the encroachment of technology. Many years ago he founded the Lead Pencil Club (he may be the sole member) as a protest about how the speed and convenience of writing on a computer were at the expense of quality. Today, when “editor” has almost become a word you have to look up in the dictionary, he is still wielding that pencil like a sword in the fight for literary excellence.

The chosen entries, which are submitted as the best of their best, come from the names that have been literary paradigms for decade upon decade — Paris Review, BOMB, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Granta, Sal­magundi, and some 60 other small presses. Can they still thrive? Can they still make it in the face of big commerce? Will there still be dedicated people like Bill Henderson willing to look out for us, the nation’s readers, to make sure our lives aren’t reduced to twitterings? We can but hope.

You glance at the blurbs, maybe raise an eyebrow a little at Richard Ford saying, “More good poems, essays, and stories are found in these presses than in any other place on the planet,” and launch yourself into this tome. And the truth is that it doesn’t take long before Mr. Ford is vindicated — everything you read in this collection is outstanding.

Zadie Smith’s wonderful “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” which follows an aging transvestite on a trip to Manhattan’s East Side to get a new corset, gets the collection off to a rambunctious start. It’s laugh-out-loud funny; until it isn’t. Anyone who has ever sabotaged an opportunity by being overdefensive will feel a twinge of self-recognition as Miss Adele storms out of the helpful corsetier, full of self-righteous and unjustified indignation.

And isn’t that what one hopes for — in a short story as much as a novel — something beyond the story itself, something that lingers long after and creaks around in the back of the mind, perhaps an insight into old problems, or an infinitesimal change in some long-held prejudice, or a little sympathy where there was none before. Something that enriches.

For this reviewer, the anthology would be $19.95 well spent just for “Long Bright Line” by Josh Weil. At the beginning of the last century, Clara’s father is a member of the Society for Aeronautical Enthusiasm and he passes on his obsession for all things aeronautical to his daughter. But she is a girl, her place is in the kitchen. When he wins a trip in an air balloon it is Clara’s younger brother who goes with him. As the years pass, her hopeless desire to be an aviatrix changes as she decides her place is on the ground after all, where, obsessively, she starts to make huge earth canvases, with mown grass, planted corn, shoveled snow, that can be seen only by the postal carriers who fly over her farm. It is a lovely, slow paean to the life and soul of an artist.

Lisa Lee’s “Paradise Cove” is a chapter from a novel she is working on about a dysfunctional Korean immigrant family. This episode features as nasty a display of sibling jealousy as I can recall reading, and it is to be hoped the novel follows fast on the heels of the prize so we can find out what happens to that hellish brother. 

E.A. Durden’s “The Orange Parka” follows another immigrant, Rakesh from Guyana, as he tries to cope with the death of his wife, a freezing northern winter, precarious employment, and, primarily, his missing daughter, who has been skipping school and over whom he has lost control.

Pingfang — if you have not heard of it before, it would be good to Google this World War II Japanese biological research unit before reading the strange and beautifully written “Train to Harbin” by Asako Serizawa. Read the entire entry, harrowing though it is, because a little background information here is important. Ms. Serizawa moves very quietly through this tale of secrets and lies and of how compromise and cowardice and circumstance can turn a young man into a brute and, what is worse for him and the world, then allow him to go unpunished.

Among the essays, there’s an interesting one by Joyce Carol Oates about her youth growing up on a farm, reading, reading, reading, then discovering some of those aforementioned small presses while at Syracuse University, where she earned 70 cents a week working in the library. As it turns out, she was first published not by any of them but by Mademoiselle, which at that time, if you can believe it, was publishing serious writing by William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, Paul Bowles, Flannery O’Connor, and Truman Capote.

There is so much wonderful writing here: Frederic Tuten’s “Winter, 1965,” about the pains of getting published, Dan Chaon’s “What Happened to Us?” about tragedy as seen — but not understood — by an 8-year-old boy, poetry by Tony Hoagland, Edward Hirsch, and Jane Hirshfield, and I am barely halfway through the book.

There are 68 entries of fiction, poetry, and essays in “Pushcart Prize XL,” and although I knew that these had been whittled down from a much larger number of submissions, I didn’t realize to what extent. In the back of the book are listed the small presses that submitted entries — about 1,700 of them! What a labor of love this volume is; what an armada of editors scudding through oceans of text to discover the best. Long may it continue.

Sheridan Sansegundo, a former arts editor of The East Hampton Star, lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Bill Henderson lives in Springs.

A New Place for Readings

First, Southampton Books, a spanking-new shop on Hampton Road in that village, was worth visiting for its rare books section, a rare thing hereabouts. Now comes the pull of author appearances — readings, signings, Q&A, you know the drill. The series opens on Saturday at 4 p.m. with Matt Marinovich and “The Winter Girl,” a psychologically rich tale of a disintegrating marriage, a dying S.O.B. of a father, an unnerving house next door, and, perhaps darkest of all, a bleak winter in Shinnecock Hills. 

Next up? Chris Knopf, a Southampton part-timer, will drop in with “Cop Job,” his latest Sam Acquillo Hamptons murder mystery, two weeks hence (that would be March 12 on the calendar), also at 4 p.m.

Pulitzer Winner at the College

It isn’t every day that you get a chance to hear a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet read from his work “up close and personal,” as it were, and in a space intriguingly called the Radio Lounge, with a little milling-and-chatting reception thrown in, maybe something to quaff to take the edge off, what with it being a Wednesday night in the dead of the off-season. . . .

Gregory Pardlo’s the name, “Digest” is the winning collection, 7 o’clock’s the time, the Stony Brook Southampton campus is the place, Writers Speak is the happening, and — you’ll have to trust the faceless compiler of this semi-column on this one — the guy has racked up numerous literary awards and won several fellowships and gloried in his poetry’s publication many times over in various journals, mags, and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the Camden campus of Rutgers U.

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.

“Kill and Be Killed”

Louis Begley

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.95

Having been assigned Louis Begley’s new novel, “Kill and Be Killed,” I have, I confess, committed the first sin of book reviewers. I did not finish the novel. I apologize, but I just could not. If Mr. Begley and his publishers deign to read this modest review, they will undoubtedly use this admission to disregard any momentary sting my words may cause them, then chalk the whole thing up to snark. For others who have no financial or filial connection to this book, however, let me assure you that this is a novel that you too will be unlikely to finish, and may have a hard time keeping out of the fireplace. 

For the record, I have read two previous books of Mr. Begley’s, and enjoyed them both in varying degrees. “The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head” is an insightful, if slender, biographical essay on Franz Kafka, while “Wartime Lies” is among the indispensable Holocaust novels. The latter was also nominated for a National Book Award. 

“Kill and Be Killed,” meantime, seems dropped from another planet.

It is a cynical book. It is a hastily written book. It is, at times, an utterly illogical and stupid book. Worse, it is a book that if you shined a black light on it to reveal the invisible ink, you would see dollar signs where you had thought there were words.

“Kill and Be Killed” is the second in a series that began with “Killer, Come Hither,” and clearly the strategy here is to zoom in on the wings of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series and hit the commercial thriller genre up like an A.T.M. Mr. Begley even appropriates Mr. Child’s hero, Jack Reacher, who in these novels is called Jack Dana. Dana, too, is a military veteran. But where Reacher is a credible character of harsh logic and monastic habits that allow him to move in stealthy pursuit of his target, Dana is an illogical mix of cold-blooded killer and dedicated sensualist (not to mention a novelist, for reasons that will escape the reader) who never lets murder or injustice get in the way of an afternoon at the museum or a good meal. 

First, the writing. One of the hopes with reading a genre book by a world-class author is that you will encounter a higher grade of prose than the average thriller offers, some golden nuggets to savor among the clichés. John Banville’s Quirke series, for example, is beautifully written, as are the mystery novels of Jim Harrison. Though “Kill and Be Killed” has its moments, the writing in general seems harried, and Mr. Begley is somehow content to include dialogue such as “I’ll hunt you down like the varmint you are.” It’s a line that will remind readers more of Yosemite Sam than good noir.

And then there is the matter of basic logic, which is in woefully short supply. It begins in Venice, where Jack is holed up working on a new novel and suffering over a woman named Kerry who has recently left him. Just as Jack makes the decision to return home and try to win her back, he suddenly learns that Kerry has died (officially of an overdose, though he suspects murder). Naturally Jack hops the first plane back to New York to comfort friends and family, help make funeral arrangements, and begin his own investigation. Right? Actually no. He immediately cancels his flight while offering this explanation: 

“Whatever else I may have been telling myself, the real reason I wanted to return was to win back my poor Kerry. Now there’s no point. I won’t stay here forever, but I can work here pretty well. The time to return will come, but not now.”

In other words, If she’s going to die on me, then screw it, I’ll get back to my novel. In fact, Jack hits the desk the very next day and produces, we are told, “twice my daily quota.” Nothing like the death of an old flame to set the creative juices flowing.

So Jack remains in Venice, where he grieves Kerry’s death in the eternal way of mourners everywhere: by checking out the paintings of Titian, eating good Venetian food, and getting in a workout with his trainer, Fabrizio.

There is also the thoroughly laughable scene where the hero is confronted by an assassin, presumably in a pre-emptive move by the novel’s evil billionaire, Abner Brown. Logic tells you that when a wealthy man like this wants to off somebody, you can expect a pretty high level of competence and discretion — they can afford it, after all — and so the call goes out to a world-class sniper, or a master engineer to rig a fishy car crash. If it’s Vladimir Putin, maybe some plutonium in your puttanesca.

Not Brown, however. He sends an assassin whose weapon of choice is, of all things, a crossbow. Not only this, the killer’s aim is a little askew (jet lag, maybe?), and he expends no less than 10 arrows on Jack, none of which come close. Mercifully, it seems, the hero guts him like a pig: “I sliced his belly open,” explains this gourmand/novelist/Marine. “The guts spilled out . . . he continued to writhe and howl. It got on my nerves . . . I slit his throat.” Soon after, for identification’s sake, Jack cuts off the killer’s finger and stuffs it in his pocket. 

Gruesome as this scene is, it’s still early in the novel; later on we get scenes of cruelty and gore that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. I’m no prude, but it’s a little disappointing to watch an author who has written so intimately about the Holocaust trafficking in violence so casual and gratuitous. You may wonder where this sensibility is coming from, but then you can probably guess. Did the author suddenly, after a dozen books, spawn a sadistic imagination? Or is it because he thinks this is what you want, cynically pandering to the bloodlust he believes you carry in your heart, as if all thriller readers were barbarous rubes. 

On and on it goes: the implausibility, the great meals, the gleeful cruelty. I finally checked out around page 150, which of course raises the question: Was I remiss in my duties by not finishing this novel? Is a reviewer obliged to read to the end of a book no matter how shabbily he or she is being treated? Have I mentioned how illogical it is that Jack Dana, who is in his early 30s and has spent the better part of his life as an active Marine, is conversant on subjects as diverse as St. Augustine, Philip Roth, Edward St. Aubyn, and Italian Renaissance art, not to mention fine wine and international cuisine? (The 30-year-olds I know have no idea who the Beatles were.) Or that when a package arrives at Jack’s apartment he suspects is a bomb, he calls neither the F.B.I. nor even local police, but instead puts the package in his library for later inspection? Or that the very day after his maid is brutally assaulted on the streets of Manhattan as a provocation/warning from his nemesis, he decides to go on an early-morning jog through the most remote barrens of Central Park, only to be confronted by one of Abner Brown’s thugs? 

Some novels you can’t put down; others seem to defy you to finish them. 

Why so hard on Louis Begley’s “Kill and Be Killed”? Because it is a corrupt novel written by an important author trying to cash in on a genre for which he has no instinct or respect. And because I know he can take it, since it is inconceivable that the author could have any emotional attachment to a book where everything has been so blatantly, if clumsily, appropriated. And finally, because Mr. Begley has apparently hit a point in his career where he thinks it’s okay to make a little cheap money, that he has done good work and deserves this, and because I suspect he wants to go back to Venice for the Barolo grappa and the sumptuous Titians and wants you to pay for it.

Don’t let him. 

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

Louis Begley lives in Manhattan and Sagaponack. 

The Southampton Review, the literary and fine arts journal of the M.F.A. in creative writing and literature program at Stony Brook Southampton, has announced the creation of the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, entries for which can be submitted until March 15.

Named in honor of the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” who was a teacher at the Southampton Writers Conference from 2002 to 2008, the prize will be given to two writers, both of whose entries will be published in the summer/fall edition of the magazine. In addition, first prize will be $1,000 and second prize will be $500.

Lou Ann Walker, editor of TSR, said the prize was named not only to honor McCourt’s memory and achievements but also to encourage memoir writers to infuse their work, as did McCourt, with a sense of humor, no matter how serious the content.

The journal is looking for “writing that is intimate, illuminating, moving, tragicomic, or just plain comic.” Submissions should not exceed 4,500 words. Complete details about the prize and other submissions to the magazine are available at thesouthamptonreview.com.

“Oh, That’s Another Story”

Alexandra Eames and Whitney Hansen

Harbor Electronic Publishing, $40

In Dorothy Zaykowski’s “Sag Harbor: The Story of an American Beauty,” the historian writes: “Sag Harbor’s earliest newspapers published little in the way of local news, concentrating instead on astory, sermon, and both national and international events. It is likely that folks learned all the local gossip and goings on at the general store, barber shop, or on the street corner.”

But “goings on” are what take up most of our lives. These are the events that mean so much to us, that take up most of our head room. How hard is it to imagine standing over the fence chatting with a neighbor as you take a break from shoveling snow, waiting in line at the post office to mail off a package, standing at the park pushing the swing for a child? Whatever you’re doing, you’re listening to the tales being told to you or behind or in front of you.

“Oh, That’s Another Story,” a singular look at village life, reminds us to listen and see what’s around us, to think about what seems so everyday, and put all of that information into a much broader historical and sociological context.

As Alexandra Eames and Whitney Hansen, both longtime transplants to Sag Harbor, began the process of understanding their attachment to this place, they realized they loved hearing the stories they heard incidentally, the charming, natural talk of adults recounting the past. Not earth-shattering sagas, but regular stories. Stories with heart. Small incidents that made all the difference in people’s lives. In this place that has great historical and emotional significance. An area where those odd-duck artists and writers gathered because of the light, the history, the freedom. Because there were also regular people in this place who would accept them. (Never mind those whaling captains and Prohibition-era bootleggers and all those nouveau riche . . . but, oh, that’s another story. . . .)

The novelist Alan Furst’s setup of this book is simple and direct. He points out that he grew up on New York’s Upper West Side, lived on an island off Seattle, then in Seattle proper, did a stint in rural Pennsylvania, and six years in Paris. And now he lives in Sag Harbor. He recounts some of the obstacles to living in this resort area — parking difficulties are paramount. And yet he writes: “I’m home. . . . I’m hooked, here for life, and I think the following pages will give you some idea why.”

This book appears at a time when there are plenty of squabbles, and, yes, lawsuits, over zoning in the village. The us-and-them quality has been a staple of Sag Harbor life seemingly from 1707, with the “us” and the “them” shifting in definition. After all, this is a village where a British fort was attacked during the 1777 Meigs Raid during the Revolutionary War. (Yankee Doodle versus the Redcoats, right? And now we love when the former Redcoats visit.) 

Because Sag Harbor was the first official port on entering the United States, the village became a cultural melting pot from the late 18th century on. Sag Harbor has long been at the intersection of commerce and art: The whaling industry was at its peak in the 1840s, and there are many mentions of the village in “Moby-Dick.” In World War I, torpedoes were tested in the bay. Thomas Alva Edison was one of the witnesses. The Hurricane of 1938 ripped off the elaborate steeple of the Old Whalers Church. That church is smack up against that Revolutionary War fort’s site — now the Old Burying Ground. And nearby is President Chester A. Arthur’s summer home where the poet Robert Lowell later lived. The moral conflicts in John Steinbeck’s “The Winter of Our Discontent” are played out on Main Street. And of course Steinbeck’s journey of discovery, “Travels With Charley,” starts in Sag Harbor, only to head west. And come back home.

All this in a place of around 2,100 people. It’s people that “Oh, That’s Another Story” really addresses. Ms. Eames and Ms. Hansen spent years chatting up residents. Here is a place where Polish families settled in Goat Alley at Henry and Division Streets. Little Dublin was on Lower Main Street, not far from Mashashimuet Park. Eastville was home to African and Native Americans, many of whom became sailors and harpooners. Eastville was also known as a station on the Underground Railroad as slaves tried to get to Canada. And later the areas that included Eastville became one of America’s first middle-class and upper-class African-American enclaves.

Ms. Hansen does an extraordinary job of bringing us the beauty and the complex simplicity of Sag Harbor in her art. Ms. Eames’s description of Ms. Hansen’s woodcut techniques is excellent. As is Ms. Eames’s ability to weave together the historical and the everyday. 

One caveat regarding “Oh, That’s Another Story”: The physical size of the book and the choice of cover stock give it the feel of a young person’s workbook. This volume is anything but. Because . . . oh, those lush paintings. Oh, the maturity required to appreciate these seemingly simple accounts. 

In the acknowledgments, Ms. Eames writes of the interviewees: “Everyone was eager to talk, to spread the good word, and let us know that even though life has been hard, they love living here.” The listening and the seeing have paid off.

Laura Wells lives in Sag Harbor.

“Late”

Carole Stone

Turning Point, $17

It’s never too late to take inventory of your life, because the end always comes too soon. For Carole Stone, the time is now. “Late” is the poet’s most recent collection and catalogs the moments following a diagnosis of cancer. The book is divided into four sections: “After,” “Beginnings,” “Late,” and “Out East.” And more than just a prelude to the end, the poems are a decisive journal of rebirth.

“Late” reads like a memoir. There is a clear narrative force behind the poetic language that elevates it to a survivor story without drama. Ms. Stone depicts her world as it is, with tender recognition of the ephemeral nature of things and unsentimental praise for its essential being. It’s not so much an ode to life, but an honest account of details and circumstances through the poet’s eyes:

Seaweed drying, 

shells without clams,

like my uterus touched by death.

Along the path, like a nomad

who awakens to an oasis,

I find a beach plum.

Purple juice squeezed out,

its bitter flesh touches 

my lips, my tongue. 

In the shadow of all 

that is hard to bear, 

this next dark phase of my life,

isn’t being born enough? 

I’m glad to be moving, 

even sideways like a crab

crawling back into the water

on my way 

to where words drop off.

The poem “Dread” may be fixed on fear, yet something greater happens. The poet is “glad to be moving” and escapes the trap of suffering on her way “to where words drop off.” The initial response to painful news may be to deny the full reality of it. Ms. Stone writes about an experience with cancer in a way that delves into the process of treatment and recovery without succumbing to cliché. In “After,” the book’s opening section, the poet faces adversity her own way and offers a refreshing look at life going on despite the diagnosis.

In many ways, “Late” symbolizes the chance we have to take stock of our existence at any time. The next section, aptly called “Beginnings,” features poetry of remembrance. When faced with death, what essentially matters?

Summer surrounds me,

gust of wind, 

a Long Island beach, 

salt smell of time past,

at the Jersey shore in August,

aunts and uncles in a circle

on striped beach chairs, gossiping.

No talk of my mother and father

in their graves.

Washed up broken shells shine 

like the small diamond chips 

of my mother’s wedding band.

I’ve worn it and worn it 

for so many years,

like bits and pieces

of her short life.

Her ring has not worn down,

fits my finger perfectly, 

like the beach shells 

which were once whole.

The sun radiates 

from the tiny yellow shells. 

Goodbye I cry 

from my end-of-summer heart. 

The poem “Shells” captures the particulars of a summertime experience. Images of broken shells evoke a mother’s absence, which portends the inevitable disappearance of the poet, too. It’s after looking back that we are able to see ahead more clearly, and Ms. Stone balances this paradox like a tightrope-walker, with a casual expression on her face. Her poetry is from the heart sophisticated; like a mother’s love it contains multitudes and provides for the unexpected. 

In the third section of the book, the poet is more extroverted and imagines life and death simultaneously in the world. There’s a liberation from duality and a return to normality with new awareness. She contemplates losing a partner while waiting for a bus, the fallacy of perfection while cutting an apple, her granddaughter’s piano playing, what her last request on earth would be, the beauty of Verona Park at dusk, and reading “Finnegans Wake” with a book group. The poetry is full of appreciation for what remains.

The final section, “Out East,” portrays the simple and enchanted life we live on the East End. It’s easy to write too much about idyllic places and kill your subject. Better to be brief and let those things of beauty speak for themselves, to participate in the aesthetic of near silence. 

I can only tell in images 

what painters copy — 

the heron taking flight,

the nesting cormorants, 

the Queen Anne’s lace,

leaning into the wind.

In poems like “Plein Air,” Ms. Stone is at her best. Poets give everything to write such economical lines. They say it all. Yet I have to quote one more passage from a poem titled “Bric-a-Brac” because of its humor and Byronic charm.

Death’s been charmed away 

by chemo and chance.

An AARP article says to spell out 

last wishes in advance.

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

Carole Stone’s previous collection of poems was “Hurt, the Shadow.” A professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, she lives part time in Springs.

“Hillary”

“Hillary,” a striking hagiography just out from Jonah Winter and Raul Colon (Schwartz & Wade Books, $17.99), unapologetically insists the time has come for Mrs. Clinton, who’s been summering in Amagansett of late, to ascend to the presidency, placing her in a historical timeline that begins with Shakespeare’s exemplar of strength, Queen Elizabeth I, and includes Joan of Arc and the fictional Rosie the Riveter.

They forgot Maggie Thatcher, but anyway, the book, billed as suitable for ages 4 to 8 but potentially useful even for middle schoolers, hits all the highlights of a life in politics, from Hillary’s 1969 Wellesley commencement address (in which she memorably delivered an unscripted rebuke to Senator Edward Brooke, a Vietnam War sympathizer who just minutes before had chastised antiwar demonstrators) up to her record-setting 112 countries visited as secretary of state in the Obama administration (“up in the air, wearing your sunglasses, checking your smartphone, your tray table piled high with reports to be read”).

Mr. Colon’s illustrations in watercolor and colored pencil are beautiful — smooth and almost sculptural in their monumentality, at times nearly worthy of a Diego Rivera mural (though Hill’s no socialist, not like that guy from Vermont). 

One other note: Mr. Winter takes pains to point out his subject’s efforts on health care during her husband’s presidency and how she had her own West Wing office, a first lady first. And if she was no potted plant during those years, the adult reader’s head may well swim with all the policies that 20 years on have lost their luster, to put it mildly.

But that’s a story for the coming electoral wars.

“Naughty Mabel”

“Hello, darlings. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Mabel. Mabel of the Hamptons,” a French bulldog says, addressing the reader from a lounge chair floating in a vast swimming pool, breaking the fourth wall, as it were, a la Hope and Crosby in their “Road” movies. Or maybe Bugs Bunny is more apt.

“And this,” the big-eared lapdog continues, gesturing with a fruity drink, “is my humble abode.” Columns, fountains, statuary, it out-Gatsbys Gatsby.

Thus opens “Naughty Mabel” (Simon & Schuster, $17.99) by Nathan Lane (of stage and screens big and small, yadda yadda) and his partner, Devlin Elliott, East Hampton part-timers, with illustrations by Dan Krall, who has worked on the animated movies “Coraline” and “The Boxtrolls.” Mabel, though based on the authors’ actual pet, seems kin to other undersized and impish kid-lit stars, from Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline to Ian Falconer’s girl pig Olivia.

The difference here being our anti-heroine’s impulse to wanton destruction for destruction’s sake — her head stuck in a Thanksgiving turkey’s body cavity, the Christmas tree bowled over, diamond ring and car keys swallowed, golf cart totaled, and soiree trashed by a raid targeting the pigs-in-a-blanket platter, the swells subsequently dispersed by potent doggie flatulence. 

“I just like to keep things interesting,” we’re told. 

A quibble arises with the appearance of two neighboring friends, Smarty-Cat and Scaredy-Cat, which doesn’t lead anywhere, and the story blows past a nice stopping point, when Mabel, taken aback by her owners’ forgiveness, offers, “Humans. Go figure.”

Be that as it may, Mr. Krall’s illustrations are appropriately antic and bold. As is the humor, for instance when Mabel relays her penchant for licking. Uh, even herself? “Do you mind, darlings?” she says, turning her back. “This is private.”

“The Mellops Go Spelunking”

Here’s a welcome return. We last heard from Tomi Ungerer, the Hans Christian Andersen Prize-winning author, illustrator, and former East Hamptoner, in 2013 with his mysterious “Fog Island,” in which a rustic brother and sister grow close in exploring a far-off, shrouded place. Now the publisher of that book, Phaidon, has put out a new edition of one of his early children’s books, “The Mellops Go Spelunking,” previously released in Germany nearly 38 years ago.

They’re pigs, the Mellops, adventurous pigs. Father, playing a not-so-adventurous round of golf, sees his ball disappear down a crevice and immediately rallies his sons to descend into the netherworld — ostensibly to go after it, but not really. To explore.

With rope ladder, provisions, helmets, and wiener dog in tow, they encounter everything conceivably of interest in a cavern, from icicles reminiscent of one of Mother’s cream cakes (which she just so happens to have stayed behind to bake) to stalagmites and stalactites (the kids learn the difference) to cavepig art on the walls (which they trace as a way of documenting) and prehistoric artifacts (earthenware, a fishbone needle) to smugglers’ stashed casks of perfume (it’s France).

More adventure than they bargained for comes by way of a downpour’s flood, and the Mellops have to use their wits, and those darn casks, to get out alive. 

It’s all good family fun, with illustrations by Mr. Ungerer that are quick and sketchy in a way not unlike William Steig’s. Dive in.

“Village of Immigrants”

Diana R. Gordon

Rutgers University Press, $27.95

One-third of the full-time residents of Greenport are Latino, the first of many facts to surprise me in this lively and valuable contribution to understanding the Village of Greenport today. In her book “Village of Immigrants: Latinos in an Emerging America,” Diana R. Gordon, a retired academic, has drawn a portrait of the village that is thorough but not pedantic, granular at times, sweeping at others, and, at its core, a personal story: Ms. Gordon lives in Greenport, it is her hometown, and she wants its Latinos to stay and prosper. 

Between 1880 and 1910 more than 17 million foreigners arrived in the United States, admitted as immigrants and expecting to be employed as manual laborers. Its unique charms notwithstanding, Greenport exemplifies a nationwide pattern of immigrants settling into rural areas, seemingly indifferent to the pull of large coastal cities. Framing Greenport as “Absorbing Immigrants Since 1840,” as one section of the book is titled, Ms. Gordon recounts its history of immigration and settlement, tracing its rise and fall — “Boom, Bust, and Back Again” — until the present day. 

The name “Greenport” was established in 1831; however, the hamlets of Southold Town and the Village of Greenport remained isolated until 1844, when the first train of the Long Island Rail Road arrived in Greenport from New York City. Through the centuries, the people of Greenport were robustly employed in whaling, shipbuilding, fishing, menhaden and oyster processing, and brickmaking; with the advent of the railroad came the summer people and, for them, the hotels and restaurants their lifestyles demanded. The good years were followed by the calamity of the 1938 Hurricane and a severe postwar downturn. The rich fled, leaving workers unemployed, vacant housing, and a heroin epidemic.

The picturesque “leafy calm” that Greenport offers its visitors in no way betrays its now-invisible history of economic and demographic collapse that began after World War II and continued into the 1950s and ’60s, ending when enlightened mayors and dedicated citizens began implementing a plan to clean up its deterioration and revive its downtown, with financial support from government and private funds. 

Ms. Gordon aptly describes Greenport as “a magnet” — for retirees, second-home owners from New York City, tourists, and, starting in 1990, Latinos from Mexico, Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras), and South America (Ecuador and Colombia), rapidly rising, as reported by the 2010 census, to one-third of the village’s full-time population.

Published at a propitious time, “Village of Immigrants” puts into stark and repulsive relief the cruel language in which the 2016 election debate is taking place in this country, in particular the unbridled bigotry with which presidential candidates characterize immigrants and promise immigration policies. In contrast, Ms. Gordon sets today’s Hispanic population, a term she uses interchangeably with Latinos, in a historical context of waves of immigration that have shaped Greenport. 

Each chapter sets out one of the many challenges awaiting an immigrant individual or family, documented or undocumented: school, language, housing, health care (“Cobbled Care”), licenses and lawyers, work, feeling American. Augmented with detailed profiles of real (but disguised for confidentiality) individuals — Edgar, Sofia, Javier, Jorge, Ricardo, Patty, their travails and their triumphs — these chapters build a rich picture of immigrants that is both personal and individual, but through their layers the chapters are transformed into portraits of families and ethnic groups. (To watch a televised G.O.P. debate immediately after reading Ms. Gordon’s work is to wonder how the debaters’ combative promises and threats are experienced by those “living in the shadows.”)

The shortsighted emphasis on immigrants as “takers” obscures the lesson that Greenport is learning: Immigrants are also consumers who contribute to the gross domestic product of the village. Increasingly, they are homeowners and owners of small businesses, contributing to the village tax base. Although some complain that immigrant children are a tax burden on the schools, Greenport is beginning to see that without them its aging population could well leave the schools moribund.

Perhaps the generosity with which she shares the respect, admiration, and affection she feels for the people she writes about is Ms. Gordon’s most important contribution in “Village of Immigrants.” Their ambition and work ethic, she writes, “are good for Greenport and good for the country. That the immigration system doesn’t reward them is a national shame.” 

She credits village residents and officials, including law enforcement, with special mention of former Mayor David Kapell and Sister Margaret Smyth, for making allowance for the “precarious” nature of immigrants’ lives and points out that most illegal immigrants start life in America having broken the law and in debt (to the coyotes who trafficked them over the border). Although the author cannot officially bring Greenport’s immigrants out of their shadows, she has taken us into their shadows, to experience what it means to live a life sin papeles.

Without its immigrant workers Greenport would not be the thriving small town it is today. Ms. Gordon fears that unless its environment becomes more hospitable for its lower-wage worker population, Greenport could enter a period of stasis, regressing into a two-level demographic of wealthy second-home owners and poorer permanent workers to service those homeowners. Such reduced heterogeneity would rob Greenport of its multicultural charm and, more significantly, prevent the emergence of a vibrant middle class. 

Central to this undesirable outcome is an affordable housing market discussed in the chapter “Housing or Houses?” The high cost and insufficient availability of rental housing puts a roadblock on the path to fuller participation in the economy. 

Greenport — and the Town of South­old — would do well to pay greater attention to the policy implications in Ms. Gordon’s book. An unapologetic champion of Greenport, she writes about the village’s provision of health care through HRHCare, an accountable care organization: “In its small way, Greenport has been ahead of the transformative care curve, at least for its immigrants and low-income residents.”

And then she goes further, asking in the last chapter if it is “A Small-Town Model?” Compared to other small towns (Perry, Iowa; Independence, Ore., among others), Greenport does offer multifamily houses for low-income tenants, its schools are not closing, its economy is based on small businesses, and blatant anti-immigrant hostility is unusual. “And how,” she asks, “can Greenport, initially successful at absorbing today’s immigrants, nourish that accomplishment in ways that foster true integration?”

To make policy or predictive claims is to go beyond Ms. Gordon’s intention; nevertheless, she urges her hometown’s politicians and planners to consider her observations and to delve further into the successes and failures of immigrant absorption experienced by other small towns in America. Without close strategic attention being paid to planning for economic development, housing, seasonal variations, and many other variables that affect both immigrant and native populations, she warns, future revitalization is anything but assured. 

Hazel Kahan is a writer and the host of two interview programs on WPKN Radio. She lives in Mattituck.

Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak series will resume on Wednesday at 7 p.m. with a conversation between April Gornik and Andrea Grover, curator of special projects at the Parrish Art Museum. The event will take place in the Radio Lounge of Chancellors Hall.

Among other things, they will talk about Ms. Gornik’s recently published book, “April Gornik: Drawings,” a complication of charcoal drawings done by the artist since 1984. The book includes introductory essays by Steve Martin and Archie Rand, an interview with the artist by Lawrence Wechsler, and an eight-page score for cello and piano, composed by Bruce Wolosoff and inspired by one of Ms. Gornik’s paintings.

The college is also offering a new, 17-session noncredit writing workshop for residents of eastern Long Island, beginning Wednesday at 5:20 p.m. and continuing through May 18. Students need not be accepted by, nor enrolled in, the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program in creative writing in order to participate.

The workshop, which will be conducted by William Ste. Marie, an instructor at Stony Brook and the College of Staten Island, will focus on multiple genres. Students will read and analyze a variety of works to develop a foundation in the basics of writing, then concentrate on the short story, screenwriting, and poetry. Each student will produce a quality poem, a short story, and a short film script.

Class size is limited to 16 students; the cost is $700. Interested writers can apply at the Stony Brook Southampton website.