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.

“Thomas Murphy”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco, $24.99

I must admit to some trepidation about reading and reviewing Roger Rosenblatt’s new novel. His wonderful memoir “Making Toast” — about the sudden death of his 38-year-old daughter and how he moved in with her family, along with his wife, to provide care and comfort — never crossed the line from tender sentiment to sentimentality. But a brief summary of “Thomas Murphy” gave me pause: An elderly Irish-American poet meditating on loneliness and loss meets a young blind woman facing loneliness and loss. How could Mr. Rosenblatt pull this one off without succumbing to some easy, sappy resolution or utter bathos?

Thomas Murphy, born in Inishmaan, a tiny, sparsely populated island between Galway Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, is now a recently widowed senior citizen on the teeming Upper West Side of Manhattan. He’s become somewhat absent-minded, to the distress of his only child, a single mother named Maire. In the “brain” doctor’s office, where Murphy goes at Maire’s urging, he’s all carefree bravado. “Look at me! I know what year it is. I can spell syntax. And recommend. If they asked me, I could even recommend a syntax.”

On his own, though, he’s on shakier ground, as he mourns his dead (he still looks for his lost wife, Oona, in every room of their apartment, “just in case”), ruefully contemplates the persistent passage of time, and replays old regrets. Why didn’t he ever answer a fan letter from his poet-hero, W.D. Snodgrass? And then there’s the business of misplaced house and car keys, and an unwatched, burning pot of eggs. Maire’s uneasiness about her father’s welfare might not be unfounded. 

Yet Murphy still functions at a high level. His literary memory is intact, and his responses on the take-home neuropsychological test the doctor gives him are sharply smartass, and often hilarious. A question about balance problems leads to an answer about balancing his checkbook. To another, regarding his ethnicity — Asian? Black? Hispanic? White? Other? — he replies, “All of the above, just like you, you racist bastards.” 

He leads a poetry workshop at a homeless shelter, where he perceives nearly all of his students as schizophrenic, unable to make narrative connections. But he concludes, “What’s anathema for normal social life is meat for the poet,” and that “Somewhere in the holy messes of their minds, they would prefer to be pain free, not poets.”

As for himself, poetry is simply a way of life, sparked in childhood by his “unshaven, baritone da of the red creased neck and the whiskey breath” reading Yeats and Padraic Colum aloud to him. Murphy takes his beloved 4-year-old grandson, William, out for walks and lively conversation in Central Park, and, while Maire (presumably) and the reader nervously hold their breath, brings him home again, safely. 

Sarah, the blind young woman, enters Murphy’s life in an entirely offbeat way. One evening at a favorite drinking hole, he’s recognized (from a newspaper photo) by a stranger at the far end of the bar. The man, Jack, who sidles over, has a mission. It turns out that he’s going to die within a few months, of colon cancer, and needs a “good poet” to break the news to his poetry-loving wife. He’s apparently too inarticulate to do it himself. What an idea! Of course, Murphy declines. He doesn’t know these people; this should be a private moment between husband and wife, etc. etc. But Jack is persistent and eventually sends a photograph of his Sarah to Murphy, whose reaction is instant and visceral.

“Naturally, I looked first at her eyes, which were gray and did not seem blind but full of wit and knowing. . . . Male that I barely still am, of course I studied her breasts.” Her picture is propped on his writing desk next to a drawing of John Millington Synge. Murphy thinks, “I don’t know why. Now she did not seem so alone.” 

Aloneness is one of his — and this novel’s — abiding concerns. Although he professes to having “failed every subject except solitude” in school, he admits that “living alone is one thing. But dying alone?” Death, too, is often on his mind, or “Mr. Death,” looking like “Wallace Stevens with a scythe” (no offense intended).

Murphy doesn’t act right away on Jack’s bizarre request, and when he finally does, it’s Sarah’s picture, rather than her husband’s pleas, that compels him. As he sees it, he and she “are old friends who have yet to make each other’s acquaintance.” So he finds himself in Jack’s red Corvair, heading for Queens. On the way, Jack refines the terms of their contract. Could Murphy just get to know Sarah — say, in four or five visits, before they “lower the boom”? This is far more than Murphy bargained for, but his pity for Jack and curiosity about Sarah “of the bittersweet smile” lead him to a compromise agreement: two visits and then they break the bad news to her. 

But sightless Sarah sees right through their scheme. She knows that Murphy has been assigned to tell her that Jack is dying, in some loopy version of Cyrano de Bergerac. 

She knows a lot more than that, actually, but this isn’t a spoiler alert; I won’t reveal the surprising plot twist she discloses to Murphy during a meeting alone with him that she’s set up. Let it suffice to say that she enters his life in a significant way just as his cognitive losses begin to pile up. The forgotten ZIP code, the front door left wide open, the sudden “liquefying” of West 86th Street as he tries to make his way home, and, perhaps worst of all, Maire’s realized suspicion that he’s suffering from hallucinations. 

She and the doctor aren’t persuaded by Murphy’s alliterative celebration of his situation. “But think of the fullness in forgetfulness — the universe of thought and feeling that forgetfulness replaces for the things forgotten.” A brain scan is ordered and the damage defined: beta-amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, hippocampal atrophy, like words from a new language. “Some science shit,” in Murphy’s opinion, but he agrees to a blood test to confirm or disprove a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, his mother’s disease.

In the meantime, there’s another blow: Maire announces that she and William are moving to London, where she has an important job offer. Murphy is stricken by the news — “Christ, what will I be doing walking in Central Park without my little man beside me?” — but puts on a typical, swaggering front. “I give her a hug nonetheless, and tell her it’s great and that she’s great and the job sounds great and that I’ll be great. . . .”

At least there’s the continuing presence of Sarah — their increasingly intimate conversations, her charming letters to him, and his to her, and the ultimate marvel of their lovemaking. She’s the perfect antidote to his feelings of grief; they seem to share a singular vocabulary and a single sensibility. He’d had a comparable oneness with Oona. 

Is this what I feared — the author’s convenient copout for the sake of a neat ending? Happily, no. But is Sarah only a temporary tourniquet for Murphy’s fresh psychic wound? Or has he just made her up out of his own longing, with a poet’s desperate, fertile imagination? As we used to say in middle-school book reports, read it yourself and find out. You’ll be glad you did. 

This is the sort of novel you mark up with pleasurable abandon, so that you can read passages aloud later to someone else, which it seems I’ve done, in a sense, in this review. “Thomas Murphy” is so well written, it was difficult not to. 

One often wonders which parts of a novel are autobiographical and which are fictional. I suspect that some of the exchanges between Murphy and Maire and William come from Roger Rosenblatt’s own experience, from similar exchanges with his daughter and his grandchildren. In all good fiction, fact and invention often mingle and blur. What matters in the end is that the whole contains, as it does so strikingly here, both hard and consoling truths about how we live.

Hilma Wolitzer’s novels include “An Available Man” and “The Doctor’s Daughter.” She and her husband lived part time in Springs for many years.

Roger Rosenblatt teaches at Stony Brook Southampton and lives in Quogue. “Thomas Murphy” comes out on Tuesday.

Black Lit Read-In

Of course you don’t need an officially designated month to dig the great John Edgar Wideman’s tales of the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, to cite one example, but an officially designated read-in might encourage you to stand up and share them with friends, neighbors, countrymen. Such a one happens on Friday, Feb. 12, at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, put together with the help of the John Jermain Memorial Library. 

Readers have been invited to read fiction or nonfiction passages from black writers — poetry, too — starting at 5 p.m. Readers have also been asked to give someone at the venerable bookshop a heads-up call that they’ll be doing so.

Poetry at the Parrish

Maybe this is the year to goose dull February with a writing workshop, and not just any old workshop among a proliferation of workshops, but one in which you tread the airy, well-lit halls of Water Mill’s Parrish Art Museum in search of poetic inspiration.

Jennifer Senft, an editor who teaches English at Suffolk Community College, writes that she will “guide participants through the galleries, introduce a different poetic form each week, and lead the class in congenial feedback and discussion.” The Art of Poetry costs $140 for four sessions, $120 for museum members. It starts on Feb. 26 and continues for the four following Fridays from 10 a.m. to noon.

Just a touch more from Ms. Senft, if you will: “I’ll share published works at the start of each class, we’ll view and discuss a different exhibition each week, write, then workshop. We will read and review free verse as well as structured poetry.” Registration is online or by phone with the museum.

“Why We Write About Ourselves”

Edited by Meredith Maran

Plume, $16

“I only write what only I can write.” That is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s dictum regarding fiction, but surely it applies to the memoir as well.

In “Why We Write About Ourselves,” Meredith Maran has found 20 of the most compelling memoirists working today. Virtually all of them write fiction or poetry as well. Many of them distinguish between their fiction or poetry or personal essay writing and their memoirs. And yet the theme that resonates in these sections is the fact that many of these writers were taken aback, surprised, delighted, relieved at how important writing memoir became for them. 

Ms. Maran has used this format very successfully in a previous volume, “Why We Write,” which featured discussions with notables such as Meg Wolitzer, Walter Mosley, Gish Jen, Sebastian Junger, and Isabel Allende. In this volume, Ms. Maran has asked A.M. Homes, Dani Shapiro, Pat Conroy, Edwidge Danticat, Anne Lamott, Nick Flynn, James McBride, and 13 others about their thoughts, their pains, their disappointments, their successes in writing the memoir. 

For each entry Ms. Maran includes a snippet of the writer’s published memoir and writes an intro to orient the reader as to the writer’s strengths and accomplishments. Then she provides a thumbnail bio. And then — ta-da — she begins the interview. Questions regarding what’s important to the author. What works. What doesn’t. What the pitfalls are. There are a number of themes that run resoundingly through this volume. How to keep from hurting people. How to get at the truth. What is the truth? What is explosive? What is tedious? What truly matters?

This is a book designed to be dipped into. Because there is so much wisdom in these pages. So much is distilled. The very act of creating a memoir requires so much writing, sifting, considering, and more analysis.

Take, for example, A.M. Homes. Ms. Maran quotes an interviewer labeling Ms. Homes as “a social arsonist.” And then we get to the interview. Ms. Homes outright says: “I don’t like writing about myself.” She talks about the fact that rather than “Write about what you know,” she’d prefer to “Write about what you don’t know.” Her memoir sprang from a New Yorker essay she wrote about meeting her biological parents. She’d wanted to organize then stow away that information. But as she went on, she discovered that she needed to understand “primitive emotional experiences.” She struggled with protecting characters, with understanding how to tell the whole truth. 

Ms. Maran posed the question: “Whose story is it, anyway?” Ms. Homes realized that a memoir should do some good. “And not just for the memoirist.” She welcomed hearing from other people who had been adopted. In this text, Ms. Homes, the “social anarchist,” declares that “controversy is not a bad thing.”

In Dani Shapiro’s memoir “Devotion” she writes about her childhood, religion, and spirituality. She was raised by Orthodox Jews. In Ms. Maran’s introduction, she quotes Ms. Shapiro as saying that “Being yourself is hard, hard work.” Ms. Shapiro’s talk about what turned her to memoir-writing makes evident what was excruciating. After having written three novels, Ms. Shapiro realized that “I needed to stop fictionalizing the story that was haunting me: my parents’ car accident, my father’s death, my mother’s broken bones, the way my entire family changed in an instant. Telling the story in my novels, I hadn’t remotely accomplished what I’d hoped. The only way to do that was to write it as memoir.”

“I’m not a believer in memoir as catharsis. It’s a misapprehension that readers have that by writing memoir you’re purging yourself of your demons. Writing memoir has the opposite effect. It embeds your story deep inside you.”

And then she provides yet another deep truth about telling the truth: “Truth in memoir is a lie.” But not the kind of lie you think of as a lie about stealing from the cookie jar.

“Memory is utterly mutable, changeable, and constantly in motion. You can’t fact-check memory.”

In section after section, Ms. Maran gives us the deepest truths about the complicated importance and craft of memoir. Edmund White advises: “Cut to the chase. Don’t burden yourself with lots of exposition.” Somewhat surprisingly, Jesmyn Ward says that “Unlike with fiction, it’s easiest to write a memoir from an outline.” And then she says: “You get the most powerful material when you write toward whatever hurts.” Ayelet Waldman announces: “If you’re not uncomfortable and scared while you’re writing, then you’re not writing close enough to the bone.” 

And suddenly there are Cheryl Strayed’s thoughts: “The most powerful strand in memoir is not expressing your originality. It’s tapping into your universality.” She goes on to say: “Good writing is built on craft and heart. Another way of saying it is you must do your work and it must cost you everything to do it.” Yes. Heart. Yes. The core.

Perhaps the wryest lines in this compendium? Gloria Swanson’s: “I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book.” Bravissima. Because the memoir requires thought and planning, and great luck and a great story and the deepest of honesty. And, above all, true love.

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

A.M. Homes lives part time in East Hampton, and Dani Shapiro is a former Sag Harbor resident.

“The Winter Girl”

Matt Marinovich

Doubleday, $24.95

“The Winter Girl” is Matt Marinovich’s second novel. I suppose you could call it a mystery, though it has an odd quality that sets it apart from standard murder mysteries. Set in Shinnecock Hills in the off-season, “The Winter Girl” is cold, dark, bleak, and wintry. The book, like an impending winter storm, is filled with menace and the threat of destruction. 

It is narrated by Scott, who with the benefit of hindsight tells his story from some time in the future. Scott and his wife, Elise, live in Brooklyn but are staying at her father’s house in Shinnecock Hills so that she can visit him at Southampton Hospital. Her father, Victor, has metastatic colon cancer. Elise’s younger brother, Ryder, can’t help because he is in jail in Ohio, doing a five-year stretch for burglary and distribution of a controlled substance. When Ryder calls collect from prison, Elise takes the calls secretively in a room away from Scott’s hearing. 

Scott and Elise are an unhappy couple, both individually and together. “I’d wasted ten years of my life,” Scott tells us, “pretending to be a photographer.” 

“At night, Elise and I mostly watched television and avoided talking about how long it was taking her father to die. By early December, it was getting dark pretty early. By then, we had a routine down. I’d have dinner ready by the time I heard the wheels of our car on the short gravel driveway. . . . Once she gripped the steering wheel and pulled at it, as if she were going to tear it off. Then I saw her wiping the tears away . . . her mouth still gaping with grief. If you’re wondering why I didn’t run out there and comfort her, I don’t have an exact answer. One of the reasons is that it had been going on for almost a year.”

Because it is winter, and because it is the Hamptons, the houses around Victor’s home are empty. But the one right next door has lights on a timer. Scott, having too much time on his hands, finds this fascinating and spends a lot of time looking at the house through Victor’s binoculars. The lights in the seemingly empty house go on and off at set times every day. Every night at precisely 11 o’clock the lights in the bedroom click off. For some reason this unnerves Scott. 

“Besides my steadily growing affair with the house next door, there were other disturbing developments that week in December.” Victor begins calling from the hospital, leaving rageful messages on his home machine. “You son of a bitch,” he says. “Pick up. I know you’re there.” He leaves many angry messages. “How does she let you touch her? You’re a piece of shit.” He threatens to drown Scott in the bay with his own two hands. 

Elise, when she comes home from the hospital, blames it on the illness and the morphine. But Scott “always suspected that she had an uncomfortable secret regarding her father.” That night, she tells him some of it. We don’t get to know — at that point — just what Victor did to her, but, “It’s sick and it’s sad and a father who does that to his own child deserves a far worse death than being drowned in a bay.”

It is a tricky thing to review a book like “The Winter Girl” if you don’t wish to give away too much of the who-done-it-who-is-gonna-do-it. It would deeply spoil the read to reveal major plot points in a story such as this. I can comfortably say, however, that Mr. Marinovich believes, as Chekhov famously asserted, that if you don’t intend to use the gun at some point in your story, then don’t show it: “. . . deeper in his closet, an old shotgun zipped up in a beige bag. . . . I preferred my Nikon.” 

Suffice it to say that “The Winter Girl” has a dark and nebulously dangerous pall hanging over it. And the gun, as Chekhov would approve, gets used. 

There are several areas of tension. Scott and Elise’s marriage is clearly hanging on by the slenderest of threads. I vacillated between wondering if they intend to divorce or to murder each other. It turns out that Victor is quite rich, but it is questionable whether he will leave any of his fortune to his daughter. One cannot help but wonder would Scott or Elise want to kill the other for possession of this fortune? Do they want to kill Victor for the money? 

Another tension is the house next door. It is spooky in its deserted and seemingly abandoned condition. But it is a powerful lure for Scott, who is bored and lonely and becomes increasingly brazen about exploring it. Finally he finds an open door and trespasses.

Scott tells us, “The worst decisions never let you go. They come circling back, even on the best days, to find you.” That night, he and Elise get drunk, and he takes her over to explore the cold and empty house. He says, “I had this feeling that as long as we snuck around this house, we might stop finding ways out of the marriage. You need each other more when you have no idea what’s going to happen next.” They end up screwing in one of the cold bedrooms. 

Afterward, Scott starts to straighten up and pulls the comforter off the bed they have just finished on, only to reveal that the sheets beneath are stiff with dried blood. A lot of blood. Scott assumes someone has been murdered on the bed. Elise vomits when she sees the gore. They think about calling the police, but, out of what seemed to me a misguided fear of explaining their own trespasses to the police, decide not to. Instead, later, Scott goes over to the house with a bucket of soapy water to clean up any fingerprints and DNA traces they may have left. 

The house turns out to be occupied by an enigmatic and very strange young woman named Carmelita. Her relationship to the house, and as eventually turns out her connection to Victor, is unclear at first. Victor sends small amounts of cash to her, a few hundred here and there through Scott, and Scott does not know why. She knows a great deal about not only Victor, but also about Elise. Carmelita had some kind of sadomasochistic sexual thing going with Victor. Scott is “sickened by the precise blue and dull orange bite marks around her small breasts, as if some insane suckling child had tried to tear away her dark nipples.” 

Mr. Marinovich’s novel is a dark and gloomy and threatening read. When the ominous winter storm finally breaks, the story builds to a crescendo of murder and betrayal and brutal sadism. “The Winter Girl” is certainly no light summer read.

Michael Z. Jody, a regular book reviewer for The Star, is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor with a practice in New York City and Amagansett. 

Matt Marinovich has been an editor at Interview and People, among other magazines. He lives in Brooklyn.

Grace Schulman, a Springs poet and a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College in New York City, has been chosen to receive the 2016 Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for Distinguished Achievement in American Poetry. An awards ceremony is to be held in April at the National Arts Club in Manhattan. 

Ms. Schulman is the author of seven collections of poems including, most recently, “Without a Claim.” She is also the author of “Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems,” which was selected by Library Journal as one of the best poetry books of 2002 and was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Award that year, and “The Paintings of Our Lives,” a selection of the Academy of American Poets book club. 

She is the editor of “The Poems of Marianne Moore,” and her recent collection of essays is “First Loves and Other Adventures.” 

Ms. Schulman, who has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, Wesleyan, and Warren Wilson College, is former poetry editor of The Nation and former director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, where she still conducts a poets’ tutorial.

Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Italy. Her poems have received four Pushcart Prizes. 

Ms. Schulman, a resident of Clearwater, said this week that she is nearing completion of a new book of poems, and that she “writes best in the quiet woods and water of Springs.” 

“The Murder House”

James Patterson and David Ellis

Little, Brown, $28

It’s not easy criticizing a writer who gives independent bookstores a million bucks just because he likes them, and who a year later, out of the largesse of his one-man bailout program, doubles down and offers to pay their employees’ Christmas bonuses.

Then again, who’s to say how much of “The Murder House” James Patterson actually wrote, collaborating as he does, and not for the first time, with David Ellis, an Illinois novelist and appellate court justice unafraid to invoke an “excited utterance” exception in a scene of courtroom evidentiary proceedings. (Inadmissible!)

Presumably Mr. Patterson is more than a mere sketcher of outlines or a reviewer of pages, signing off on one brief chapter after another. Mr. Ellis himself has said the man with top billing acts as a goad, urging drama and heat, not polysyllabic words and description, sex and ratcheted-up violence, not research.

So this, in other words, is a page-turner, the fastest read in the East. “The Murder House” is so plot-driven, in fact, the twists and guessing games so plentiful, its plot can scarcely be discussed without giving it all away. 

Be that as it may, there’s this house. It sits at the end of what’s called Ocean Drive in Bridgehampton and it’s rumored to be haunted. Not by the ghosts of great-grandchildren stiffed out of their pen company inheritance, not even by the specter of a Midwestern industrialist howling over the bulldozing of his historic Gilded Age stick style manse. No, the place has simply seen its share of slaughter — mostly women, often prostitutes, many in a ­basement torture chamber outfitted with chains, cages, and a metal spike for victims to be lowered upon, all at the hands of generations of a twisted family, beginning with the patriarch, Winston Dahlquist, a Dutch settler, we’re told, who built the house in the late 1700s and ran a lucrative potato farm.

And yet one surviving visitor from the recent past turns out to be our heroine, Jenna Murphy, a Southampton Town cop late of the N.Y.P.D. Smart, tough yet attractive, red-headed, Bronx background, a fondness for drink — have I read too many of these or is this Detective Darlene O’Hara, from another Patterson protégé, Peter de Jonge, all over again? 

Regardless, she’s at once companionable and relentless, if a little clueless in the boyfriend department. Can it be other than diminishing to have her notice the ringless finger of the “hunky owner” of Tasty’s Diner? But at least she kicks a slick-haired Wall Streeter with a “hocus pocus” investment job to the curb (after punching him in the mouth, no less).

The Hamptons are described as the realm of “socialites, the mega-wealthy, the trust fund babies and personal injury lawyers, the songwriters and tennis pros, the TV producers and stock speculators.” Fair enough. And by the by, the authors (Mr. Patterson’s a Floridian) get a lot right, from the references to Bridgehampton as a hamlet to the description of its school, “red brick and white pillars on Main Street — Montauk Highway, if you prefer.” 

More welcome, however, is the tour we get of the underside hereabouts as Murphy pursues her hunches: the self-consciously named Dive Bar, for instance, or the hell of the Riverhead jail, “a dank, dark, miserable cesspool, purgatory for the accused in Suffolk County, short on hope and long on desperation and bitterness.” A female visitor is “a rose sprouting in a swamp of manure.”

It must be said that the murders, in more than one passage, can be rough and graphic going. Consider: The perp carries in his “Fun Bag” a corkscrew, handcuffs, and a “handheld kitchen torch.” There’s death by hot poker through kidney, and up in Sing Sing, when a set-up (and, yes, hunky) local construction worker, dubbed “Surfer Jesus” by the glib media, finds himself crucified on a wooden worktable, the reader may start questioning the redeeming value.

At any rate, something smaller than a railroad spike was used, so let’s move on.

But, to where? Given the strictures of not blowing the whodunit, perhaps we can safely leave off with an image from near the book’s close, where, after decades of Bridgehampton history in which one great old structure after another was torn down, a tradition that dispiritingly continues, at last there’s a house that deserves it. 

“Tales of Accidental  Genius”

Simon Van Booy

Harper Perennial, $14.99

Reading the novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Simon Van Booy’s own biography, one learns of the surprisingly disparate number of places where he has lived: rural Wales, Kentucky, Paris, Athens, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And he hung out in the Hamptons for a while. Perhaps there were more addresses. But why mention all of these locales? The reason is endemic to Mr. Van Booy’s thinking and to the actions of his characters. 

This collection of short stories is head-spinningly international, embracing cultures and characters of extraordinary diversity: Chinese, German, Russian, Swiss, Texan, Los Angeleno, Southamptonite. While making us understand how specific place matters when focusing on the universal. 

In his writing Mr. Van Booy often comments upon the importance of talismans — he is careful to bring those talismans from the place where they originate to an unexpected location. 

Take, for example, his short story “The Muse.” A renowned Russian-born fashion designer, Alexandra, seemingly based in America, arrives in a European city. Tired from her flight, she is checking into the lobby of a swank hotel where she encounters a man in the lobby whose coat button is dangling by a thread. Rather than retire to her room, she asks him if she can sew on the button. 

The encounter is innocent. The reader learns that the sewing kit this designer pulls from her pocket in order to sew on the button was a specific bequest from her grandmother. The reader learns that Michael Snow is a screenwriter from Hollywood who was taught the art of screenplay writing by a mentor now long gone. This screenwriter goes to hotel lobbies to write the whole night long then sleeps all day. 

Alexandra asks why he doesn’t just write in his hotel room. The screenwriter says to the fashion designer: “Maybe in order to make people up, I need to see real ones.” We are left pondering whether what we are reading is true or fictional. In other words the most basic questions regarding art and life. 

In one of the story’s flashbacks, the reader sees the fashion designer figuring out how to create new fashion lines. “Each new collection began like this, in a city with no association. Alexandra would wander the streets, stroll through a bustling market, ride an empty bus — drink coffee in a dockside cafe as birds circled the open mouth of dawn.” 

In Berlin she follows this procedure and happens upon the shop of a watchmaker. She asks him about the watches and clocks he repaired that were never claimed. At first reluctant, he allows her to see the timepieces and then he talks and talks about them. She creates a new fashion collection she calls Zeit Verloren. “Time Lost.” “The Muse” is a story about time lost and time that is found. 

But back to the talisman: When Alexandra doesn’t expect it, Michael slips a Star of David from his mentor into her bag. All the time knowing that she might not discover the small symbol that was so important to him for a very long time. But he feels obliged to thank her for her kindness, for her attention to another, and, most of all, for her attention to his art, his writing. “Language merely points,[Alexandra] had read once in a book of German poetry; the rest must be imagined.”

Mr. Van Booy’s short story “Infidelity” is not so much about what happens between the sheets but what happens at the table. One particularly intriguing passage that also pulls the reader from one place to a very different one occurs when characters are at dinner in Los Angeles where a character, David, says:

“The goat cheese is good. . . . But I prefer the lobster bisque at Silver’s in Southampton.”

“Maybe my parents will take the kids there for lunch,” [his wife said].

“Oh my God, the desserts,” David said. “I could go there just for the desserts.”

How much is going on with those sweets. Here and there.

The centerpiece of Mr. Van Booy’s collection is “Golden Helper II,” an intriguing set of modern Aesop tales. Mr. Van Booy not only threw himself into Chinese-based stories with this work, but diligently studied Chinese. In one section he empathizes with a character saying:

“When our son acts badly, make a joke so he’s not embarrassed to admit he was wrong.”

“Although Little Weng is big now, put your arms around him once a day.”

“Make him eat until bursting.”

These “Golden Helper II” sections are earnest, heartbreaking, full of the tensions of modern life with the over-lading of the past.

Mr. Van Booy’s talent for metaphor shines throughout. In his story “The Goldfish” he writes: “For the first hour he drifted from room to room as if he were a fish himself, marveling at the different colors and shapes, and how some came right up to the glass.” Those fish are so evident. It was for good reason that Mr. Van Booy received a Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for his second book of short stories, “Love Begins in Winter.”

Now, a seeming departure for a review, but an oddly apt note: Mr. Van Booy dedicates this book to Barbara Wersba, a longtime East End writer. Mr. Van Booy’s gratitude to Ms. Wersba is not only touching, but also important given the importance of mentors in the lives of writers. Ms. Wersba was nominated for a National Book Award for “Tunes for a Small Harmonica.” Some of her other books include “Love Is the Crooked Thing,” “The Farewell Kid,” and “Walter: The Story of a Rat.”

Talk about locales: She was born in Chicago, lived in California, attended Bard, then returned to Greenwich Village, ending up on North Haven, having established a press on the East End because she cared so much about writers and writing and books. 

Mr. Van Booy was once interviewed as saying: “One of my literary heroes, Barbara Wersba, said that you never finish a book, only abandon it.” Yet one senses that he will never abandon his mentor, speaking about her at length in a recent Diane Rehm NPR interview. One of the most appealing qualities in any writer is loyalty to the craft, to the word, to the teacher.

“Tales of Accidental Genius” is at times wistful. As well as playful. Intuitive and always substantive. In “The Muse,” when the fashion designer Alexandra comments upon Michael Snow’s screenplay after their chance encounters, she crosses out “Untitled” on his title page and proposes another title: “The story of love is also the story of loneliness.” In Mr. Van Booy’s stories we are transported everywhere and there and back here. At this time and that time. And all around again. 

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

Simon Van Booy will read from “Tales of Accidental Genius” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Hold the hoarding, bring the purposeful mess. So says Durell Godfrey, thematically, artistically, literally, in her just-out “Color Me Cluttered: A Coloring Book to Transform Everyday Chaos Into Art” (Perigee, $15). Ms. Godfrey, an East Hampton illustrator and photographer once with Glamour magazine and now with The Star, will talk about her work and the book and sign copies of it tomorrow at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. 

“To me, clutter is beautiful,” she writes in the introduction, “the stuff of our everyday lives. Adding a dash of color (or a rich palette — whatever you fancy) makes these illustrations feel like home,” and may be therapeutic for the congenitally stressed.

There follows page after charming page of drawings heavy on plants and Sunday-best hats, often featuring a lounging cat, and stuff, stuff, stuff: all manner of printed material, paintbrushes and colored pencils, socks and scarves. What’s more, an embedded seek-and-find game will have you searching out stray coffee cups, eyeglasses, lava lamps, and — why not? — a penguin or two. 

In “Refuge,” her most recent book, Nanci LaGarenne, an East Hampton author, has delved deeply into difficult issues faced by many women, including more than one might think here on the East End.

But, Ms. LaGarenne believes, she has come up with a story that readers will find inspirational. Released in July, “Refuge” follows “Cheap Fish,” a fanciful Montauk-based tale of a commercial fisherman, a floating bordello of mermaids, and a murder, and an as-yet-unpublished story called “Promised Land” about a circle of women in Amagansett’s Lazy Point.

In the newest book, her characters have left abusive marriages and childhoods behind and banded together as they create new lives. The author was inspired both by events in her own life and her time at the Retreat, the domestic violence agency in East Hampton, where she worked as a child-care coordinator and covered the hotline at night.

“That really changed me in a lot of ways,” she said, calling the stories the women told her “heartwrenching.”

“It was very eye-opening for me. It was tough work, and very fulfilling.” She became passionate about spreading the awareness of domestic violence and abuse issues.

When she and her sister were molested as children, Ms. LaGarenne said, “no one talked about that stuff; no one had the tools.” Her sister had implored her to address the topic of child sexual abuse in a work of nonfiction, but she decided that a realistic but fictional story would be the way to go.

“Refuge” is dedicated to her sister and to “all the brave women who escaped from abuse,” whom the author calls “beautiful warriors.” It tells the tale of Dr. Rain Taylor, a therapist and a volunteer at a women’s shelter who, at a crossroads in her own life, buys and renovates a brownstone and takes in four female boarders.

“They become sort of this little family, and they are all healing from different things that happened to them. In that, a lot of things happen,” Ms. LaGarenne said.

One of the women was abused as a child. “The character is not my sister, and it isn’t me, but that part of the story is dead-on. . . . I think there are so many people who will feel validated by it.”

The book deals with blind faith, forgiveness, guilt and shame, loyalty, redemption, friendship, and sisterhood, she said. “One bad person can change your life, and one good person can restore you and uplift you. I guess the theme is finding solace and happiness again, and having faith that the bad people don’t win.”

“There’s justice and there’s validation. The women move on and do well,” the author said. They “trade in the cards they were dealt, and it’s a whole new game.”

The latter chapters take place in Ireland, where two of the women travel and connect with another female friend. It’s a country Ms. LaGarenne knows well and loves. She talks of the “history there, and all the magic and beauty,” and evokes all of those things and a strong sense of place in that section of the book.

To self-publish “Refuge,” Ms. LaGarenne founded a publishing company, Blue Bottle Press. While the book can be found on Amazon, she has made sure it is available at local independent bookstores, including Canio’s in Sag Harbor, Burton’s in Greenport, BookHampton, and Montauk’s Tale of Two Sisters bookshop, where she will read from “Refuge” on Dec. 12 at 6 p.m.