Sunday marks the return of the venerable Poetry Marathon in Amagansett. This year’s series of readings starts at 5 p.m. that day with Joanne Pilgrim, an associate editor at The Star, reading from her verse, accompanied by Jan Grossman, a past fiction and poetry reviewer for the Rockefeller Foundation who has had poems published in American Arts Quarterly, among other journals. The readings are held in the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road, and a reception follows each.

The free series, organized by Sylvia Chavkin with the help of Annalee Collins, continues on July 19 with the playwright Joe Pintauro and the India-born Meena Alexander, whose collections include “Birthplace With Buried Stones.” The esteemed duo for July 26 is Grace Schulman, a professor of English at Baruch College and Springs part-timer whose latest book of poems is “Without a Claim,” and Kimiko Hahn of the North Fork, whose nine collections include “Brain Fever,” published last year by Norton.

Carol Sherman and Daniela Gioseffi are in store for Aug. 2, with George Wallace and Geraldine Green the following week. The series wraps up on Aug. 16, when Virginia Walker, whose latest is “Neuron Mirror,” and Carole Stone, the author of, most recently, “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems,” read from their work.

Over at the Amagansett Library, the Authors After Hours series is back with another strong lineup of summer readings. It begins on Saturday at 6 p.m. with A.M. Homes, the East Hampton author of pungent short-story collections like “The Safety of Objects” and novels of how we live now, the most recent being “May We Be Forgiven.”

Following her on July 18 will be the hamlet’s own Carl Safina. The naturalist will talk about his new book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.” On July 25, also at 6 p.m., Chris Pavone will step to the lectern to discuss how his own experiences have informed his best-selling thrillers, “The Expats” and “The Accident.”

On Aug. 1 Tom Clavin will examine adapting books for the big and small screens, which is happening now with two of his books written with Bob Drury, “Last Men Out: The True Story of America’s Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam” and “The Heart of Everything That Is,” about Chief Red Cloud.

Also that month, on the 15th it will be Anna Bernasek and D.T. Mongan on “All You Can Pay: How Companies Use Our Data to Empty Our Wallets,” with the political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall discussing his forthcoming “Snowden” the following week, and Christopher Bollen, the author of a new suspense novel, “Orient,” on the 29th.

To hail the release of the summer/fall issue of The Southampton Review, the Public Radio International program “Selected Shorts” will hit the campus of Stony Brook Southampton on July 18. In the Avram Theater at 7:30 p.m., actors such as Harris Yulin and Jill Eikenberry and authors like the poet Billy Collins will be recorded reading pieces from the new Review.

Tickets cost $35 and come with a year’s subscription to the journal of

fiction, essay, art, and photography, published by the campus’s M.F.A.

program in creative writing and literature. They can be had at stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa.

The evening is part of this summer’s Southampton Writers Conference, which began yesterday and will run through July 19. Those taking part in the conference also get tickets to “Selected Shorts.”

The latest Review has poetry by Robert Wrigley, Gregory Golaszewki’s prizewinning comic essay, Meg Wolitzer and Frederic Tuten, among others, on “How I Trick Myself Into Getting to Work,” an excerpt from the late Peter Matthiessen’s “Men’s Lives,” nonfiction by Danielle Berg, The Star’s Baylis Greene writing about a Shinnecock golfer of yore named Oscar Bunn, and a wide variety of short fiction.

Fridays at Five

The popular Fridays at Five series is back at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton with authors coming to discuss their books every Friday from July 10 through Aug. 28.

The program kicks off with Colson Whitehead talking about “The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death.” Then in July it’s Bonnie Verbitsky talking with Walker Vreeland about her “Home Cooked Hamptons,” Ken Auletta on “Lifetime Lessons Learned as a Journalist,” and Florence Fabricant on “Wine With Food: Pairing Notes and Recipes From the New York Times.”

In August, the series will feature Frances Cole James on “How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Selling Your [Brilliant] Self in Any Situation,” Arlene Alda talking about her “Just Kids From the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History,” Brooke Shields with Kathleen Marshall  on “There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me,” and, finally, to end the discussions, Alice McDermott discussing “Someone: A Novel.”

Admission is $20 for each talk or $80 for a pack of five. The authors will also sign books, which can be purchased on site. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be served in the library garden. The programs run from 5 to 6 p.m., with doors opening at 4:30.

Writers Conference

The Southampton Writers Conference at Stony Brook Southampton, which is part of the college’s master of fine arts program in creative writing and literature, has invited the public to this summer’s readings, lectures, panel discussions, salons, and receptions without having to be registered for credit. The cost is $950. The conference begins on July 8 and runs until July 19.

Roger Rosenblatt, a prolific writer and Stony Brook English professor, will offer five lectures on the craft of writing and be joined by such guests as the cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Evening programs will include readings by Billy Collins, who twice was the United States poet laureate, Amy Hempel, Ursula Hegi, Meg Wolitzer, and Melissa Bank, among others. Attendees can sign up until the first day by going to stonybook.edu/mfa/summer.

Those attending the conference will receive complimentary tickets to a program celebrating the launch of The Southampton Review’s  summer/fall edition at the college’s Avram Theater on July 18 at 7 p.m. The program, “Selected Shorts,” at which actors and writers will read excerpts from the review, is otherwise for those who subscribe to it.

At 40 years old this year, it’s fair to say “Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses” has matured into a powerful voice in American literature. It’s also fair to say WordTheatre, a nonprofit organization founded in 2003 that in its own words “gives voice to great writing” has gained momentum, with its growing list of film and television celebrities and acclaimed authors as partners.

A benefit on Saturday at Guild Hall in East Hampton Village titled Where Words Survive and Thrive will allow WordTheatre to support Pushcart’s efforts as well as kick off the celebration of Pushcart’s milestone. An impressive lineup of actors and actresses, including Amber Tamblyn, Carla Gugino, Ari Graynor, Sarah Wynter, Vincent Piazza, Zack Grenier, Ben Schwartz, and Christopher McDonald, will read some of the best of the best curated from Pushcart’s four decades of anthologies.

“It’s my biggest pleasure to do this. It’s the 40th anniversary, so I said let’s ensure this continues another 40 years,” said Cedering Fox, the event’s producer and a voiceover professional who has, for the past three years, lent her voice to the Oscars.

The Pushcart Prize holds special significance for Ms. Fox, whose mother, Siv Cedering, a poet and longtime Amagansett resident, twice was honored by Pushcart. Before her death, Ms. Cedering read at the first WordTheatre benefit at Guild Hall, held in 2007. Since then, Ms. Fox has returned every other year to Guild Hall to convene the talents of writers and actors in support of Pushcart.

“It’s my gift to my mother, and it keeps me connected to the community,” she said. Referring to the South Fork, she said, “I feel a real affinity for this part of the world. When you think about all the great writers who have come up through here and have been nurtured here, it’s just fitting.”

In addition to the man who started it all, Bill Henderson of Springs, Pushcart’s founding editors include Reynolds Price, Gordon Lish, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, and more than 20 other heavy-hitting names in modern literature.

For her WordTheatre performances, which are held in venues from Los Angeles to London, Ms. Fox said she has discovered many fine writers from among Pushcart’s prize recipients. On Saturday, the writers whose work will be featured include A.M. Homes, the author of the best-selling memoir “The Mistress’s Daughter” and a winner of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, David Means, a prolific short-story writer who was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner, and Richard Bausch, a novelist whose book “The Last Good Time” was made into a feature-length film.

The lineup of performers is no less impressive. Ms. Gugino, an actress and model, has appeared in movies such as “Spy Kids” and “Watchmen.” Ms. Tamblyn has starred in films such as “Django Unchained” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” More recently, she founded the Write Now Poetry Society and published the book “Dark Sparkler,” which profiles famous women “who glimmered on screen” but fell to pieces in real life.

Ms. Graynor is an actress and producer who has starred in movies like “The Sitter,” “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” and “Mystic River.” Mr. Piazza is perhaps best known for his role as the Italian-American mobster Lucky Luciano in the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.” Mr. Grenier is a Tony Award nominee of “33 Variations” fame who has more recently been involved in the TV series “The Good Wife.” Ms. Wynter is known for her work on “The 6th Day,” “Lost Souls,” “24,” “American Odyssey,” and “Californication.”

“You laugh, you cry,” Ms. Fox said. “Everybody is a 6-year-old kid when they’re listening to a great short story read by a great actor.”

Tickets to a 6:30 p.m. V.I.P. reception with the actors and writers on Saturday cost $125 and include a signed hardcover copy of Pushcart’s 40th anthology. For the show, which starts at 8 p.m., general admission tickets range from $25 to $65.

Carl Safina will speak twice in short order — first at the ever-funky, ever-indie Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, tomorrow at 5 p.m., and then at 6 p.m. on Saturday for the Authors After Hours series at the Amagansett Library.

The naturalist’s subject is, of course, his just-out-this-week book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel,” which also happens to be reviewed on this very page.

Authors Night Tix for Sale

This summer’s Authors Night, a fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library, will happen on Aug. 8, starting with a mammoth book signing and cocktail reception from 5 to 7:30, and then dinner parties at private homes with guest authors at 8. Tickets, available at authorsnight.org, start at $100 for the reception with more than 100 writers, and range from $300 to $5,000 for the dinners.

This year’s dinners will welcome the likes of Phil Klay, whose “Redeployment” won a National Book Award; the actor and director Edward Burns, recently out with a memoir called “Independent Ed”; the designer and decorator Jonathan Adler; Ambassador Christopher Hill; Jules Feiffer, whose new graphic novel is “Kill My Mother,” and Michael Shnayerson, whose latest is “The Contender,” a biography of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Art Barge Writing Workshops

The Art Barge on Napeague is now offering writing workshops, led by Sarabelle Prince, a writing instructor, on Saturdays through Aug. 22, with the exception of Aug. 1. “This series explores how elements of the creative process merge and influence one another,” a release said.

This week’s workshop is called Portraits, with Chiaroscuro following on July 25. En Plein Air, Minimalism in Writing, and Action in Writing round out the series. Each meets from 10 a.m. to noon and costs $50. Registration is at theartbarge.org.

Journal-writing techniques will be the focus of another Art Barge workshop, in which participants will spend “a day in the art studio” and thus possibly “discover you work best with drawing, painting, or collage as a prompt for further self-expression.” It runs from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 and again from Sept. 7 to 11.

“Beyond Words”

Carl Safina

Henry Holt, $32

Over the centuries, most scientists believed that nonhuman animals lacked thoughts and emotions. Scientists assumed that other species just automatically react to stimuli — unlike humans, who make plans and experience feelings such as sorrow and joy. A few pioneering thinkers, such as Charles Darwin in the 19th century and Jane Goodall in the 1960s, challenged this traditional view, but without much success. Indeed, researchers who wrote about animals’ thoughts or feelings were accused of anthropomorphism, falsely projecting human qualities onto other species. These investigators’ papers were usually rejected by scientific journals.

Finally, as the 20th century came to a close, animal researchers such as Donald Griffin and Marc Bekoff began to make a dent in the traditional attitude. Their writings created new awareness of the possibility that other animals think and feel. Carl Safina’s new book, “Beyond Words,” will expand this awareness.

Mr. Safina observes that a major reason for denying thought and emotion to other species is that they lack human language. “Because we cannot converse with other animals, animal behaviorists threw up their hands, saying we can’t know if they think or feel, and we should assume they cannot.” But other animals do communicate in their own languages. As Mr. Safina says, they use “scents, gestures, postures, hormones and pheromones, touch, glances, and sounds.” It isn’t easy for humans to decode their communications, but Mr. Safina shows that if we patiently study their exchanges and sensitively observe their behavior, we can begin to understand their mental and emotional lives.

“Beyond Words” covers a wide range of material. Mr. Safina focuses on three kinds of animals — elephants, wolves, and killer whales — but he also writes about numerous others. Mr. Safina tells us about his interviews with scientists who are studying animals in the wild, and he discusses several contemporary research topics, including tool-use in other species and comparisons between human and nonhuman physiology.

The book is beautifully written. Some passages are pure poetry. For example, this is how he describes elephants approaching from the distance:“Finally I saw that the very land itself had risen, that the sunbaked land had taken form as something vast and alive and was in motion. The land walked as multitudes, their strides so utterly of the earth that they seemed the source of the very dust.”

Mr. Safina tells us about elephant memory and other cognitive abilities, such as forethought. For example, nursing mothers need to drink water daily, but before they venture into a marsh they nurse their babies longer than usual. The mothers know that it will be difficult for their babies to nurse in the water, so they make sure their babies are filled up beforehand.

But Mr. Safina gives more attention to elephant emotions, especially grief. When a family member or companion elephant dies, elephants suddenly go silent, and they frequently visit the deceased’s remains, gently touching the body with their trunks. When Eleanor, an elephant matriarch in Kenya, died, others tried to revive her, and they stayed with her body for as long as a week later. Some elephants have been observed covering the deceased with dirt and leaves. When a young elephant dies, the mother may slowly trail far behind the herd for several days. It seems clear that she is depressed. Mr. Safina believes these expressions of grief reflect how much elephants love one another.

Grief reactions are common because so many elephants are killed. As the author explains, the slaughter of elephants for their ivory has been going on for centuries. By the 1500s, Europeans had combined the ivory and slave trades. “Captured humans marched captured ivory to coastal ports, where both were shipped.” After slavery was abolished, elephants fell victim to poachers. Africa’s elephant population dropped from about 10 million in the early 1900s to 400,000 today. At present, “an elephant dies every l5 minutes.”

Elephant life still has its happy side. Like other young mammals, young elephants love to play. Mr. Safina quotes Cynthia Moss, a legendary elephant researcher, who described youngsters “racing about, beating through bushes and tall grass, heads up, ears out, eyes open wide glinting with mischief . . . letting forth wild, pulsating play trumpets.” They sometimes pretend they are chasing lions in the brush.

During mating seasons, mature elephants are in high spirits. Males walk with a swagger; females move in a wiggly, rolling, coy-looking manner. Sometimes mature elephants just act silly, as when they walk on their knees — just having fun. Elephants become happiest after it rains, or when they see babies playing or sleeping. Babies bring them great joy.

But the descriptions of the elephants’ happiness are bittersweet. The threat of hunters is always present.

When it comes to wolves, Mr. Safina says that before the Europeans arrived, there were probably a million in the territory that became our lower 48 states. By 1930, humans had wiped out 95 percent of them, primarily through hunting. Since the 1970s, government protections have enabled populations to recover somewhat, but in the last few years protections have been weakened.

Mr. Safina emphasizes the extent to which wolves care about members of their families, sharing food and going to great lengths to help them. For example, he describes how a young, sickly wolf, seeing his sister being attacked by three hostile wolves, jumped into the fray and managed to save her life.

Killer whales, sometimes called orcas, actually belong to the dolphin family. Mr. Safina explains that there are several types of killer whales and predicts that these types will eventually be classified as separate species. The general public has become familiar with killer whales by visits to marine theme parks, where the animals are held captive.

Compared to wolves, there is less information on the sizes of killer whale populations, but the numbers of several types are clearly dwindling. This is often because humans have overfished the salmon they need for food.

Like elephants and wolves, killer whales are extremely social animals that care for one another. Surprisingly, they also have been known to look out for humans. Mr. Safina tells of people who were out boating and became lost in thick fog. They feared they would drift out to sea. Then killer whales appeared and guided them home. When we hear about these animals’ altruism toward humans, their captivity in marine parks feels all the crueler.

When Mr. Safina turns his attention away from elephants, wolves, and killer whales, one topic he discusses is animals’ sense of beauty. I found this discussion particularly intriguing. He mentions how two chimpanzees separately climbed to the top of a hill, greeted each other, clasped hands, and watched the sunset. Humans, of course, enjoy sunsets as well. Humans also find beauty in the same visual patterns and scents that attract many insects. Mr. Safina points to a fascinating topic for further research.

Running throughout the book is a central question: Just how unique are humans? Mr. Safina recognizes that each species has its own special talents and capacities that have enabled it to adapt to its particular environment. But he believes that commonalities are more fundamental. Beneath all the diversity, we are all kin.

The book includes endnotes that direct the reader to the author’s sources. I think the endnotes could have been fuller. I realize, though, that a longer list might have made the book so large that it would discourage potential readers. Perhaps expanded endnotes could be placed on a website.

But this concern pales in comparison to the impressive quality of this book. It is well reasoned and highly informative. Above all, it is an eloquent call for greater respect for the animals that share the planet with us.

William Crain, who lives part time in Montauk, is president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife and a co-founder of the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary in Poughquag, N.Y. His most recent book is “The Emotional Lives of Animals and Children: Insights From a Farm Sanctuary.”

Carl Safina’s books include “The View From Lazy Point.” The founder of the Safina Center on the environment at Stony Brook University, he lives in Amagansett. 

“Out of Line: The Art

Of Jules Feiffer”

Martha Fay

Abrams, $40

One of the most incisive Jules Feiffer quotes Martha Fay uses in this generously illustrated biography gets to the core of the artist’s culture-shaking genius:

“I wanted to put the essence of my reader on the page . . . to move him out of his genteel, benign, suburban WASP landscape. I wanted to circumcise the sucker and transplant him from the Jazz Age from whence he came to the Age of Anxiety, from Babbittry and Dale Carnegie to Sigmund Freud. . . .”

Mr. Feiffer was talking specifically about the ’60s and his strip “Sick, Sick, Sick” in The Village Voice, but the combination of societal insight and creative aggression reflected in his remark has been the booster rocket of all his work and why, for more than 50 years, we have hung on the fence of his deconstruction site watching the work of this nervy kid who can say the things we wouldn’t dare and probably couldn’t think of in any case.

The hard cover underneath the dust jacket of “Out of Line” is a facsimile reproduction of Mr. Feiffer’s art class binder. It is an endearingly clunky lettering job spelling out JULES FEIFFER ART 330 SEC. 5.14 along with a determined drawing of a palette and brush. In faint pencil lines all over the cover are Jules’s doodles of superheroes, boxers, and math computations. In the drawings’ obvious fervor in which the young Jules proclaims himself an artist and its establishment of two of Mr. Feiffer’s main themes (minus the math), the cover sets up the charming and witty tone of the whole book.

The first chapters show drawings Jules’s mother saved from his childhood and the family photographs from the same period. The drawings, youthful as they are, establish an attitude, vigorous and pugnacious, that we can recognize in Mr. Feiffer’s early comics, the breakthrough strips in The Village Voice, and even the plots of his plays and movies that followed. That’s one of the things the many illustrations in the book establish, that with all of the false starts, the moving into new territory, the experiments with style, there is a core confidence in Mr. Feiffer that never really wavers.

Ms. Fay’s fluid and urbane writing gives the sociological context that the story needs given how much Mr. Feiffer was reacting to the times, and she uses quotes from Mike Nichols, Hugh Hefner, Ed Koren, and this one from Art Spiegelman to reflect Mr. Feiffer’s relationship to his peers: “That’s what made Jules so significant and a real role model. He had to reinvent comics to take advantage of his subjectivity, his . . . intellectual side.”

In revisiting the many Village Voice strips reproduced in the book I was struck by how time-defyingly brilliant they are. The characters he invented seem like friends from my youth whose anxieties and pretensions are forever current — the modern dancer celebrating spring and her personal angst; Bernard, the nebbish, agonizing over the meaning of manhood and his failure with women; Huey, the cad, who succeeds where Bernard fails.

Then, of course, the parade of politicians whose words Mr. Feiffer unmasks for the manipulative dissimulations they are. The strip in which President Kennedy checks in with his press secretary for polling on his popularity, for instance, reveals the hungry ego behind the heroic facade. Mr. Feiffer lets Nixon, sitting, stolidly staring out at us, speak for himself in strip after devastating strip. Mr. Feiffer’s satirical provocations probably had the same impact on the young in the ’60s and ’70s as Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” has had in our time.

Intermittently, during these years of writing and drawing “Sick, Sick, Sick,” Mr. Feiffer had been writing plays, “Little Murders” and “Knock, Knock,” among others, and screenplays, “Munro,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Popeye,” and “VD Blues.” The stories that Ms. Fay tells of the writing and producing of these plays and films are the most celebrity-filled parts of the book and, along with the popular triumphs of these productions, describe Mr. Feiffer’s difficulties with some of his collaborators and with the critics of the work. Walter Kerr, for instance, first put down “Little Murders” as being “the funniest of Mr. Feiffer’s jaundiced visions,” before seeing it again and giving it his big thumbs-up.

Ms. Fay’s story of Mr. Feiffer’s experience writing the script for the movie “Popeye” is the classic literary writer’s story of being chewed up in the maw of a big Hollywood production, but Mr. Feiffer’s candidness in revealing his interaction with and his feelings about the director Robert Altman give the tale a vividness you don’t usually get in these movie recollections.

Although Mr. Feiffer had illustrated Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth,” the real beginning of his children’s book period began with the creation of “The Man in the Ceiling” in 1993. It started as a failed collaboration with his longtime friend Edward Sorel, Mr. Feiffer to write the story and Mr. Sorel to illustrate it. When Mr. Sorel backed out, feeling the gist of the tale wasn’t right for him, Mr. Feiffer decided to proceed and illustrate it himself. The picture book form released a different kind of fictional writing in him that was immensely pleasurable, led to his doing 10 more books for children, and, in a way, prepared him to embark on the most significant book of his current career.

“Kill My Mother,” a graphic novel, to which Ms. Fay devotes the last 11 pages of the book, is an extraordinary achievement and, as Ms. Fay writes, “might be said to bring [Mr. Feiffer’s] long run full circle.” The novel is a complex story involving all Mr. Feiffer’s favorite noir set pieces from 1940s movies: the tough detective, the mysterious dame, meetings under lamp light, and even a scene in the World War II Pacific jungles with a transgender soldier (Jules, you got ahead of the zeitgeist, again!).

As ingenious as the story is and as satisfying the zing of the dialogue, the art, it seems to me, is an even more astonishing accomplishment. Sixty-three years after the young Jules Feiffer struggled unsuccessfully to match the smooth complexity of Will Eisner’s style in “The Spirit,” the 84-year-old Feiffer broke through to his own way of drawing and painting a much more complex story than he had ever tackled. The rapid, impatient Feiffer line still gets to the essence quickly, but now the artist can use it to describe extremely nuanced body language and the interaction of many figures in a scene. Where once color in his work was a secondary handmaiden to the line, it now becomes a major element, evoking light, atmosphere, and psychology. Whole scenes are dominated by the mood of what the color washes and intricacies set up. I can only imagine the bliss he felt while working on this book.

“Out of Line” is a fascinating visual and literary journey through the multifaceted life and work of a creative icon of our times. The book couldn’t have had a more satisfying ending than to document Jules Feiffer stepping up to the plate once again and, with “Kill My Mother,” hitting an artistic home run.

James McMullan, formerly of Sag Harbor, has painted scores of posters for Lincoln Center Theater and illustrated many children’s books with his wife, the writer Kate McMullan. His latest book is “Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood.”

Jules Feiffer lives in East Hampton. 

Adoption Revisited

Lorraine Dusky’s 1979 memoir, “Birthmark,” was the wrenching account of her giving up her daughter for adoption. Now, 36 years later, the longtime Sag Harbor resident is returning to the story and her critique of how adoption is handled in this country.

The follow-up memoir, “Hole in My Heart,” published through Amazon, explores her reunion with her daughter, the difficulties for a child with two families, and her daughter’s death in 2007. She’ll read from it at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Park Avenue “Primates”

You’ve heard of Wednesday Martin’s new “anthropological memoir,” “Primates of Park Avenue,” involving her experiences raising children on the Upper East Side of Manhattan among the privileged, the gym-frequenting, the blond? Well, she’ll be interviewed about it next Thursday at the Southampton Arts Center.

Her interlocutor, Alex Kuczynski of Southampton, is a contributor to The New York Times and the author of “Beauty Junkies.” The talk, which starts at 5:30 p.m., is part of a series she is hosting at the center, which is in the old Parrish Art Museum on Job’s Lane. The cost is $18. Also of note? There’ll be wine.

“Bookmarked”

Wendy Fairey

Arcade Publishing, $25.99

A blurb for Wendy Fairey’s new book might read as follows: “Bookmarked” is about a professor who remains endlessly passionate about her reading of English literature and who skillfully shows how her thoughtfully lived literary life is surprisingly the stuff of novels.

But in the beginning of this book Ms. Fairey talks about her struggle finding the backbone for this work. In 1992 she’d published a memoir, “One of the Family.” (More about that in a moment.) The book helped her move into full professorship at Brooklyn College. In 2002 she’d published a collection of linked short stories, “Full House.” All of her life she’d written a great many academic treatises. In this book she wanted to write about her love of reading. The only problem was the plot was eluding her because she didn’t want to go back to “repurposing” the material from her first memoir.

She started off focusing “on my genealogy of fictional prime movers — the orphan, the new woman, the artist, and the immigrant — still interested in the ways these figures are both marginal and representative and create a historical line. But impersonality, it turned out, was not the best mode for me. As I went along, I found keeping to it hard — it seemed too dry, and perhaps I wasn’t done yet with my own story. The personal seeped back into my project and transformed it to ‘an odd mixture.’ ”

As she goes on to write: “My idea became to write a memoir of a life of reading. This would still be a study of literature, but it would document something intensely personal as well. It would be nonfiction about fiction. . . .”

But here were the nonfictional aspects over which she was lightly treading. Her mother was the renowned Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who’d had a long-term affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had created a “College of One” for Graham. The books he chose for her included history, art, music, economics, and certainly poetry and novels. Ms. Fairey grew up amidst Thackeray, Henry James, Dickens. Fitzgerald loved talking with Graham about these works as she, an orphan and an immigrant, made her way through them. He died of a heart attack in her living room just before Christmas 1940.

All of this happened before Wendy was born, yet the stories shaped her entire life. In Southern California she endlessly read the books from the “Fitzgerald College.” After Fitzgerald died, Graham flew to England to become a war correspondent, which led to terrible nightmares. But while there Graham became pregnant with Wendy — during an affair with a married man. Graham convinced another man it was his baby, married him, and he never knew he wasn’t Wendy’s father. It was only decades later that Ms. Fairey learned the identity of her true father.

Ms. Fairey’s great caution about not overusing her stories was a result not only of her sensibilities as a student of literature, but also because her mother used the stories frequently in her own books. Sheilah Graham wrote nine books, three based in part on her relationship with Fitzgerald, and another book on “embellished” sexual exploits.

But as Ms. Fairey writes: “Living through all the interesting decades of my life from the forties to the turn of the twenty-first century, I have been, in an important sense, elsewhere.” Marilyn Monroe attended parties at the house — Wendy wasn’t fazed. Hopalong Cassidy seemed to be a bit more interesting. He “posed with my younger brother and me, all of us in black Hoppy outfits, six shooters drawn, under our Christmas tree.” Ms. Fairey, however, found Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Nicky Hilton slightly tedious. When she was 13, rather than meet Elvis Presley, she insisted on staying home to listen to a record of “Madama Butterfly.”

But at one point her mother married the tyrannical “Bow Wow,” who Ms. Fairey says hated her. He once kicked the family dog. Something Mr. Murdstone might have done in “David Copperfield”?

In this volume she discusses “the curtailing of licentious male energy,” “extraordinary salutary powers” — yet the observations here are extremely down-to-earth. For example: “Virginia Woolf understands how you might love one person a great deal and yet have good reasons for choosing to be with someone else.”

As I read “Bookmarked” I kept thinking about the “David Copperfield” quote: “My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.” And an earnest approach is precisely what defines this book.

Wendy Fairey looks unblinkingly at her own life, analyzing, admitting, parsing. “If this volume is intended as an experiment in autobiography, both inner and outer, it’s also envisioned as an exercise in a freer, more personal kind of literary criticism than I was schooled in.”

And herein is the crux of this book. It is memoir. It is an unusual take on literary criticism. But most important of all, it is a book about a person who is an extraordinary educator. She brings every volume alive for us. Only the very best literature teachers and professors are capable of finding newness every time they teach a book. (Of course the same can be said for teachers in other fields.) But the Academy needs the prescient, purpose-creating guiding spirit evinced in this book. This is a teacher who cares. Deeply. Fitzgerald may have created a “College of One” for her mother. Ms. Fairey has created a “College of One” for each of us.

There is the wonderful concept that each time we pick up a book we are different people and the reading experience of that book is different. After reading this book one cannot go back to Becky Sharp, Isabel Archer, Tess of the d’Urbervilles without thinking about oneself and the parallel themes in our lives. The classroom discussions we can have with ourselves once we’ve delved back into “Howards End,” “Daniel Deronda,” “To the Lighthouse,” and “A Passage to India” and allowed ourselves to spend time truly connecting to these works — those are priceless times, moments of revelation. Ms. Fairey gives us the tools to discover the themes within our own lives.

(One small note: A typo that will certainly be corrected in future editions. Early in “Bookmarked” Ms. Fairey, in figuring out where to start her manuscript, decides that the best initial subject would be the Victorian orphan. She discusses David Copperfield, Jo from “Bleak House,” and Jude from Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure.” But alas the proofreader missed the 1985 typo for year of publication of Hardy’s great novel.)

Ms. Fairey’s two moving postscripts underscore the very nature of this literary review cum memoir cum teaching guide: The first is when her two granddaughters, cousins who are both 14, come to visit from France. Each of whom is reading the novels that so intensely captivated Ms. Fairey in the first place — Zoé is reading Austen’s “Emma” in English. Salomé is reading “Jane Eyre,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Wuthering Heights” in translation. “Eeetcliff,” she calls him.

“I draw closer to Salomé than I’ve felt before in that each of us has been intimate with the same novel. She, too, has paused in the world of the Heights and the Grange, Heathcliff and the two Cathys. Lockwood and Nellie.” How delighted Ms. Fairey is to encounter the passion for these great works in her own flesh and blood.

And then there is the very end note in “Bookmarked.” Wendy and her partner, Mary Edith, were married in East Hampton in 2011. “It’s the marriage plot ending, after all!” Ms. Fairey acknowledges. As literature has always permeated her life, she writes: “Thank you, ‘Jane Eyre,’ for accompanying me to the last paragraphs of this journey.” And, yes, as of the last penning of this book, Mary Edith, already a great reader, was deep into “David Copperfield.”

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

Wendy Fairey lives in New York and East Hampton.