Storytelling Techniques

    Memoir: It’s all the rage, whether you’re a reader, a writer, or a publisher. How about workshopper?

    Kara Westerman of East Hampton, a veteran editor and writer who has had fiction in The New Ohio Review, a 2008 anthology called “Submerged: Tales From the Basin,” and the friendly neighborhood Star, is offering a free course, “The Memoir in Your Head: Developing Techniques for Universal Storytelling,” at the East Hampton Library starting on April 30 from 5 to 6:30 p.m. and running on subsequent Tuesdays through May 28. Sign-up is with the reference desk.

Poetry and Then Some

    Speaking of writing technique, Kathryn Levy will be all over the topic on Sunday at 3 p.m. at the John Jermain Memorial Library’s temporary digs on West Water Street in Sag Harbor when she fields questions, reads some of her poems, and talks about the “role of poetry in the world.” The gathering is limited to 18 people, so registration in advance isn’t a bad idea. The poet, who lives in Sag Harbor, has a volume, “Reports,” coming out in the fall from New Rivers Press. In 2006, her collection “Losing the Moon” was published by Canio’s Editions.

    Canio’s Books in that same village, by the by, is where Earth Day celebrants will gather Saturday to read nature writing they admire. Among the participants so far are James Monaco, a Sag Harbor publisher, another villager, George Held, who’s a poet and former English professor at Queens College, and the Rev. Alison Cornish of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork. They’ll start clearing their throats at about 5 p.m.

    At 3 p.m. that day, a chance to reacquaint yourself with Zachary Studenroth, late of the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, will present itself at the bookshop. Now the director of the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council, he has a new book in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, titled, unsurprisingly, “Cutchogue and New Suffolk.”

“Westerly”

Will Schutt

Yale University Press, $18

   Will Schutt’s first book, “Westerly,” chosen by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets award, is a slender collection of 24 lyrical free verse poems and five translations from Italian poets. All the poems announce the presence of a skilled albeit youthful poet. The poems exhibit fluid movement from the abstract to the concrete and from memory to observation, punctuated by an often startling lexicon that had me rolling syllables in my mouth and reaching for my Webster’s. But the word that comes to mind to best characterize Mr. Schutt’s poetry is one he himself uses in a poem, restraint.

    The collection is divided into thirds. The first section contains poems wherein the speakers look back at some aspect of life, often with amazement or dismay or criticism. Many of these poems are set on Long Island’s East End. The middle section contains the translations, and the final third deals with memory, too, but the personas seem to speak from Italy, for which the section of translations paves the way, often far distant from the location of the memory.

    A representative poem from the collection’s first section is one I admire a great deal, “In the Middle Distance.” I suspect the title refers not only to the use of perspective on an artist’s canvas but also to the speaker’s impending middle age. In this poem the speaker reads a book about Velazquez, the prose of which takes him back to a youthful time when “I called movies films / back then. My labored hyperbole / put most people to sleep.” This air of self-deprecation appears elsewhere in Mr. Schutt’s poems, as if his personas are just now registering they have grown and matured.

   The speaker’s former use of strained hyperbole is contrasted in the very next line with the present: “Now lunch is meager: steamed / asparagus, a glass of lemon water.” Youthful excess has given way to adult monasticism. The poem concludes with an observation upon Velazquez’s “Las Meninas”: “the narrow / face of a rousing mastiff / whose dark narrow eyes betray / knowing, which is to say restraint.”

    So for this speaker, and for more than a few others in this book, the acquisition of knowledge and experience results in restraint, dispelling youthful extravagance and poetic hyperbole, which readers will be hard pressed to find in this collection.

    In another striking poem, “American Window Dressing,” we see Mr. Schutt use restraint as a means of intensifying his imagery, and some of his images are truly striking. This poem’s speaker announces a love of haiku because it is “spartan, semi-transparent,” a statement that elides seamlessly to a memory of the speaker as a boy lifted by his father to peer into a storefront window where he sees “row after row of ducks, like smokers’ / lungs.” This speaker informs us that “knowledge of them was terrible,” and that the ducks and bok choy and fish laid out on ice were “Terrible / things put delicately, like polite fictions / families invent.” Words like “delicately” and “polite” put me in mind of these poems, which achieve a gracefulness as a result of the poet’s restraint.

    For Mr. Schutt, the average and the quotidian are viewed as justifiably poetic (think Wordsworth). In “Rock Maple, White Pine,” the poem’s persona, writing about his German ancestors, repeats an old saying,  “ ‘Where there’s manure,’ / they agreed, ‘there’s Christ,’ ” thus elevating even waste to the divine. But this combination of restraint and praise is best expressed in one of Mr. Schutt’s translations, “I taught my sons,” by Edoardo Sanguineti, which is impressive and short enough to quote in its entirety:

I taught my sons to know my father was an extraordinary man: (they can

tell it like that, to someone, hopefully, in time): and then, that all

men are extraordinary:

    and that of a man there remain, oh,

about ten phrases, maybe (adding it all up: the tics,

the memorable remarks, the gaffes):

    and those are the lucky ones:

The lucky ones! If only a few of our biographers could take this poem to heart as Mr. Schutt apparently has; less, and even less than that, is apparently enough to frame even the “extraordinary.”

    The collection’s final third is influenced by the old world of Europe, its art, its poets, and contains a beautiful elegy, “Crenellated Elegy,” and the obligatory poem about poetry (“A Kind of Poetry”). The latter is one of Mr. Schutt’s shortest poems here, itself a commentary on the uses of restraint. The poem offers a trenchant commentary on a key difference between the old world and the new — overseas, trees have branches cut “for birds to fly through,” while here branches are cut to “only make room for wires.” This image speaks of the collision of nature and technology in our country. Elsewhere, as the speaker tells us:

    Sometimes you turn to poetry

    the way you turn to another country.

    Everything is better. More humane.

   In Europe trees are pruned to accommodate nature; here, a tree may have “the entire center perforated / like a dart board in a dive bar.” Is there any more scathing indictment in our poetry today than comparing America to a dive bar? But the poem ends on a note of reconcilement. The poem’s criticism turns when the speaker’s homesickness sentimentalizes the ending: “After a while, however, you recall / those wires carry a language you know.”

    Mr. Schutt uses very well in “Westerly” a language we know. He gives a shout-out in the title poem to another poet known for great restraint, writing of “scarves of water” that “If one were Elizabeth Bishop / one might hear it turn into a tidy music.”

    Will Schutt has created in his first collection of poetry a “tidy music” indeed, and “Westerly” is a book that will reward the mind and the ear upon successive readings.

   Dan Giancola’s collections of poems include “Data Error,” from last year, and “Part Mirth, Part Murder.” He teaches English at Suffolk Community College and lives in Mastic.

    Will Schutt lives in Wainscott.

Dogs for Steinbeck

    You say John Steinbeck Weekend is news to you? Never mind that and simply give in to the charm of the “Travels With Charley” dog walk on Saturday starting at 8:30 a.m. at Havens Beach in Sag Harbor. Jill Rappaport of the “Today” show, known as an advocate for the four-legged, is the host, and the beneficiaries are the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons and the Bay Street Theatre, where the walk will wind up with a “bagels and bones” reception.

    The entry fee is $25, and entrants must seek donations from sponsors. Whoever raises the most money will get a prize. Sign-up is at the theater on Long Wharf, at ARF on Daniel’s Hole Road in East Hampton, or at Havens Beach an hour before the start.

Earth Essay Contest

    Not so fast, Earth Day isn’t over. Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor has invited writers to weigh in on the theme of a “Thirty-Year Plan” for our beleaguered planet, having taken a cue from the title of an anthology published last year by Orion, the popular enviro mag out of Great Barrington, Mass. To put a fine point on it: “Describe one thing — an emotion, insight, technology, resource, practice, policy, habit, attitude — that humanity is increasingly going to need in order to build a better, more sustainable future.”

    The contest will be judged by David Bouchier, whose commentaries can be heard on NPR stations on Long Island and whose opinion columns have appeared in newspapers ranging from Newsday to The Los Angeles Times. The winner, announced in October, will read at Canio’s, receive a cash prize, and get a subscription to Orion.

    Essays should be no more than 1,500 words, double-spaced, in at least 11-point type. There is a $5 reading fee, which can be mailed along with essays to Canio’s at 290 Main Street, Sag Harbor 11963. E-mail submissions can go to [email protected], with “Earth Conscious Essay” in the subject line. The deadline is Sept. 3.

   There’s no rock ’n’ roll and just a few mentions of drugs in Nanci E. LaGarenne’s new novel, “Cheap Fish,” but it’s all about Montauk and has sex, salty language, intrigue, and a murder mystery, all aboard a high-class floating brothel called the Lily Virginia in the middle of the ocean.

    The characters were not based on real people but may carry the qualities of some or a few rolled into one, Ms. LaGarenne said. Readers, though, are having a lot of fun wondering who’s who from the Montauk bar scene, mostly Liars’ Saloon, which plays a central role in the book.

    Ms. LaGarenne and her husband, James, a retired helicopter pilot with the New York Police Department, started performing karaoke 12 years ago in and around the hamlet, and in that time Ms. LaGarenne picked up a lot of information. While her husband worked the microphone, she worked the crowd, and once people got to know her, their secrets started spilling out.

    “They knew I wasn’t a gossip so they felt comfortable talking to me,” she said on Friday at a picnic table at Liars’, a late-night hangout popular with fishermen and locals. It overlooks Lake Montauk in the harbor area.

    “Someone told me I should hang up a shingle. You can’t make this stuff up,” she said of what she has learned in the bar scene.

    When they told her their fish tales and complained about government regulations threatening the industry, she tucked it all away. One day, she was sitting with her brother-in-law while he cleaned his fishing tackle. As he was explaining what a lure is, he playfully asked her if she had ever heard of a floating brothel, and claimed to know the captain of one. At the time, she was planning on writing a novel about the karaoke scene, but once she heard about that, she knew it was a good idea for a book.

    When her husband retired, the couple decided to move full time to East Hampton. Before they started the karaoke, Ms. LaGarenne had worked as a teacher’s aide in special education and looked for a job out here in a local school, to no avail. She worked several other jobs in town and ended up employed at an insurance agency. “I was a fish out of water,” she said.

    Growing up she wrote poetry, mostly about teenage angst. She has tinkered with other books, none of which have yet been published. She started writing “Cheap Fish” in 2007. Since she doesn’t feel a connection with computers, she writes in longhand before entering it into one. What with her husband’s comments, the book went through several edits. An agent or publisher couldn’t be found, so she turned to CreateSpace, a self-publishing arm of Amazon.com. The book hit store shelves in March, and she has already had to restock the Montauk stores.

    The book is about a grizzled but (this being fiction) really good-looking 65-year-old fisherman known and liked by locals. Starting to feel his age, he knows he should slow down a bit, but the “pull of the sea” is like a magnet to him. In Liars’ one night, he meets by a guy locals call a “tree hugger,” meaning a guy with a fancy boat and a hedge fund. He approaches the older fisherman with a proposal to start a high-class brothel aboard a boat in international waters off Montauk to avoid regulation.

    Once the two join forces they realize they need a captain, one who can keep his mouth shut. They choose a “sporty,” a sportfisherman who visits on weekends. But though the sporty is good at staying quiet about the venture, he isn’t good at keeping his hands off the merchandise, namely the New York City hookers hired to work the vessel.

    When a physical therapist decides to join the Mermaids, as the hookers are called, the boat captain initiates her by raping her. He finds out the hard way that he picked on the wrong girl. The mystery comes in when he is “gutted like a fish” by an unknown killer.

    Ms. LaGarenne credits a Montauk fisherman, Donny D’Albora, in the acknowledgment section, saying the book wouldn’t have been possible without his lowdown on commercial fishing. She met with him several times and taped his stories. Mr. D’Albora’s picture as a youngster on a dock with a giant tuna even graces the cover. “He taught me the technical aspects of fishing,” she said.

    After 12 years of spinning tunes, the LaGarennes have retired from the karaoke gig. They want to spend their weekends at home with each other. She is busy editing another novel that is already written called “The Refuge,” about domestic violence.

    “Cheap Fish” is available in Montauk at White’s Drug and Department Store and the Montauk Marine Basin, and at the Gone Local gallery in Amagansett. It can also be purchased through Amazon.com.

    The life and achievements of David G. Rattray, a poet and translator who was born and grew up in East Hampton, will be celebrated in Manhattan next week with a day and evening of readings, film, and visual art on the 20th anniversary of his death.

    Mr. Rattray was the brother of Everett Rattray, the longtime editor and publisher of The East Hampton Star, and uncle to his son, David E. Rattray, the current editor.

    Fluent in most Western languages as well as Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek, he was one of the early translators of the French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. His works include “Opening the Eyelid,” published in 1990, and “How I Became One of the Invisible” (1992), wherein he traced the mystical and outlaw poetic tradition from ancient Greece to the 20th century. He has inspired writers and musicians such as Jim Fletcher, Betsy Sussler, and Thurston Moore, who described his work as providing “fantastic and calm stowaway information.”

    On Friday, April 5, the Leo Koenig Gallery, 545 West 23rd Street, will host an evening of readings and a presentation of visual materials related to Mr. Rattray’s writings, beginning at 7 p.m. Those participating include Lynne Tillman, Nicole Eisenman, Vincent Fitzgerald and David E. Rattray, Dia Felix, Basil King and Martha King, Chris Kraus, Ms. Sussler, Mr. Fletcher, Liz Kotz, Kevin Cooney, Raymond Foye, Eileen Myles, and Thom Donovan.

    The following day, at 2 p.m. at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 131 East 10th Street, another series of readings will occur with Joanna Furhrman, Robbie Dew­hurst, Ms. Myles, Gerrit Lansing, Susie Timmons, Garret Caples, John Godrey, Kim Lyons, Mr. Kraus, David Able, Ann Rower, Jesse Browner, George Quasha, M. Mark, and George Green.

Talkin’ ’Bout Your Generation

    Poets, dunk your quills. The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will hold a Sub 30 poetry slam to mark National Poetry Month next month. The competition is for short poetry by writers between the ages of 21 and 29 whose work will be judged by the audience at the April 12 slam. Original poems on the subject of “your generation” should be sent to Amanda Stein at [email protected] by Friday, April 5. Twelve poets will be picked to compete in the slam, and the winner will get a hundred bucks and the appellation Sub 30 Champion.

The New Review Honors David Rakoff

    The late David Rakoff, a writer of autobiographical humor and essays and a regular voice on the public radio program “This American Life,” is front and center in the spring edition of The Southampton Review, from the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature. The journal’s release will be celebrated on Monday at 6 p.m. at Stony Brook Manhattan, on the third floor at 101-113 East 27th Street.

    Mr. Rakoff, who taught at Stony Brook Southampton starting in 2005, died of cancer in August. Robert Reeves, associate provost at the college, writes in the new edition of the plans for a David Rakoff Studio Theatre in Chancellors Hall, and he is remembered by Lou Ann Walker, the Review’s editor in chief, Patricia Marx, who writes for The New Yorker, and colleagues including Roger Rosenblatt and Daniel Menaker. The issue features a number of pieces by Mr. Rakoff, from essays to a poem to an adapted screenplay.

    Cartoons by Gahan Wilson and Jules Feiffer return, as does the traditional balance of photography and artwork, of fiction and nonfiction by new and veteran writers, one highlight being the pianist Konstantin Soukhovetski’s “Thoroughly Modern Wagner” in the Memoir and Essay section.

A Bookish Sunday Gab Fest

    Coffee, bagels, books, and Sunday mornings: an obvious fit. So why not gather where the books are, for a chat about this or that new release? BookHampton in East Hampton is starting up an in-store book group, Books We’re Talking About, on April 7 at 11 a.m. The first title is “The Dinner,” a suspenseful novel by Herman Koch about two couples in Amsterdam whose conversation one evening slowly turns to their children’s implication in a horrific crime. On April 14 it’ll be Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being.” As it says in a release, “read the book in advance or just listen in and get intrigued.”

Chronicling Your Life

    Eileen Obser is bringing her nearly 20 years of experience as a writing coach to the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton for a five-session workshop that starts on Tuesday and wraps up on April 30. Called Share Your Life and focusing on memoir and personal essay writing, the course aims to help participants “chronicle the times” of their lives — for themselves, for their families, for history. Writers will discover their own styles “through reading and group discussion. Research techniques, excerpts from well-known memoirs and journals, writing exercises, and marketing information are included.”

    Writers of all skill levels will meet from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. The cost is $65, and sign-up is with the library. Ms. Obser, who lives in East Hampton, has taught at Southampton College and Suffolk Community College. She has a memoir, “Only You,” coming out in the fall.

“Bolero”

Joanie McDonell

Thomas & Mercer, $14.95

   I’ve noticed that when reading mysteries I can usually tell from the opening chapter if I’m in for an enjoyable ride. With “Bolero,” Joanie McDonell’s first Nick Sayler adventure, I knew within a few paragraphs that I was in good hands. The tone is smart, the setup intriguing and fast-paced, and the protagonist appealingly eccentric.

    Nick Sayler is a private investigator who lives on a vast converted barge called the Dumb Luck (he won it in a poker game). He is accompanied by his socially inept but brilliant assistant, Meriwether, and his old, valued friend Dr. Edward Sloane. And then there is his Creole girlfriend, Rue, a teaser since, while she is referred to throughout the book, she never makes an actual physical appearance.

    The barge, a floating palace, is large enough to accommodate them all. It’s moored on the Weehawken side of the Hudson, affording magnificent views of Manhattan but also creating a useful distance. It serves as a secure base of operations for Nick’s company, Sayler Security.

    Within a couple of pages we are plunged into the action: the rescue of a young woman who has been brutally beaten and is suffering from amnesia brought on by a concussion. Against his better judgment, Nick becomes involved, springing her from Bellevue Hospital, where she is about to be committed to the psych ward, and bringing her back to his barge — “a good deed, but a bad idea.” He is spurred by the vulnerability and extraordinary beauty of the victim: “even cut and bleeding her kind of beauty opens doors everywhere.” It’s a softhearted response from a tough man, and one that will lead to big trouble.

   Every once in a while, Ms. McDonell pauses the forward action to flesh out Nick’s life story: his upbringing as an orphan by the Sisters of Perpetual Grace, his previous spiral into a life of drugs and petty crime after suffering a devastating loss, his recovery and the development of his mutually respectful relationships with the savant Meriwether, the elegant homosexual Edward Sloane, and his cop contact, Tom Fallon. The story unfolds as a first-person narrative, charting Nick Sayler’s psychological and emotional development as it progresses.

    When the electricity goes out on the barge, gas lines are found to have been cut, cellphones jammed, and a gunman attempts to break in, Nick realizes that his charge is in danger of more than just a beating. It becomes his mission to protect her from a potential killer. The puzzle of the victim’s identity hangs over the first third of the book, as she only hesitantly begins to regain lost memories, starting years back in her childhood. She can’t remember her name or any recent events, and is surprised by modern inventions like cellphones and the Internet. All Nick and Meriwether have to go on are her appearance and the innate air of quality that she projects.

    Ms. McDonell is gifted at creating vivid scenes and a believable sense of locality. There are spot-on vignettes of New York life: of the 79th Street yacht basin and its ambience, of a cab and limousine dispatching company in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and of the High Line and the teenage skateboarders who hang out there. She also writes interesting subsidiary characters and a lively plot, essential ingredients in a good detective novel.

    Most important is the portrayal of the central character. Nick Sayler is a loyal friend, likable but flawed and definitely politically incorrect; he drinks too much, smokes too much, and, as the nuns would say, “has a mouth on him.” He confesses to the sins of “Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth, and Smoking.”

    If I have any criticism of “Bolero” it’s that the tension slackens in the second section of the book, which is too long and would have benefited from being cut and tightened. However, the pace picks up again in the final portion and it concludes with an exciting, if gloriously improbable, ending.

    All in all, it’s a very talented debut for what is apparently planned as a Nick Sayler mystery series. I have no doubt that it will be successful.

   Joanie McDonell is the author of “Half Crazy,” a novel, and “The Little Book of Hope.” She lives in Amagansett.

    Jennifer Hartig regularly contributes book reviews to The Star. She lives in Noyac.

Out of Alaska

    There’s more to Alaskan poetry than John Haines. Serge Lecomte, for one, who will read his work, including from his 2010 father-to-daughter collection, “Lauren at Two,” tomorrow starting at 6:30 p.m. at Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett.

    As with the late Mr. Haines (who happens to have won a lifetime achievement award from the Library of Congress), Mr. Lecomte is an author of prose, too — for instance, another book that will be for sale at the gallery, “Letters of Misanthrope Dogood Goodman.” He has also been, according to a release, an “Air Force medic, insurance salesman, language teacher, house builder, gardener, bartender,” and, more expectedly, a poetry editor. The cost is $5, free for gallery members. Refreshments are in store.

Children’s Lit Fellows

    The deadline is April 15 to apply for acceptance into a new one-year creative writing program at Stony Brook Southampton focusing on children’s picture books on up to young-adult novels. “Courses, conveniently scheduled around your professional life, are led by the very authors whose books you read in your classroom,” says the college. The faculty includes Jim and Kate McMullan, Jules Feiffer, Emma Walton Hamilton, Meg Wolitzer, and Lou Ann Walker. Twelve applicants will be selected. Sixteen graduate-level credits are at stake. More information is on the college’s Web site.

Writers Riff

    The literary essay will get its due on Saturday by way of a panel of writers well versed in the form. “Living, Out Loud: Writers Riff on Love, Sweat, and Fears” brings, among others, David Bouchier, a commentator for NPR, Iyna Bort Caruso, who has won two Emmy Awards, and Claudia Gryvatz Copquin and Paula Ganzi Licata, both of whom have written for The New York Times and Newsday. At funky Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor at 5 p.m. they’ll read, gab, commiserate, and generally shed light on the nonfiction writing life.

   Back in June 2000, Eva Moore of Montauk was reading a story in The East Hampton Star about a family of ducks rescued from a storm drain near Kirk Park by members of the Montauk Fire Department and a visiting tourist. Immediately, the author of some 22 children’s books realized it would make a good picture book. It took more than 10 years to find a publisher, get it illustrated, and get it on bookstore shelves, but just a couple of weeks after its Feb. 1 release, it had already won an award and sold more than 10,000 copies.

    In the book, called “Lucky Ducklings‚” Ms. Moore acknowledges the three firefighters: Paul Greenwood, Dennis Sisco, and Joe Lenahan, who even had a duckling named after him — Little Joe. And Perry Aaland, the tourist and contractor from Lindenhurst, who was in the right place at the right time with a “monster” pickup truck that had a winch and cable attached to it.

    The saga of the mother duck and her five ducklings began when she decided to take them out for a stroll. An attendant watched as she waddled through the Kirk Park parking lot, heading back to Fort Pond on the opposite side of Montauk Highway on a warm Sunday morning.

    She stepped off a curb near a storm drain and as the little ducks followed behind her they fell one by one into the drain. The attendant saw it happen and called for help. In the meantime, Mama Duck quacked loudly and kept spectators away.

    But when the three Fire Department volunteers showed up, they quickly realized the grate covering the drain was old and heavy and would not be an easy lift. Mr. Aaland, who was enjoying a hot dog from a nearby vending truck, offered his help. He attached the cable to the grate and used the winch on the truck to haul it up.

    Once open, Mr. Greenwood climbed into the drain, which was about eight feet deep, and handed up the ducklings to Mr. Lenahan, who put them in a bucket. At this point the mother duck, confused, kept trying to cross the busy highway back toward the pond. Two little girls on the scene kept chasing her back from the road.

    Finally, when all the ducklings were in the bucket, Fire Department volunteers stopped traffic and placed the ducklings on a grassy area on the north side of the road near the pond. Mama followed, and the six of them waddled toward the water as if nothing had ever happened.

    And just as Ms. Moore writes in the book, “that could have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t because . . .” she told the tale, with illustrations by Nancy Carpenter, a highly acclaimed, award-winning illustrator who lives in Brooklyn. She visited Montauk before she drew the pictures for the book and has managed to capture the pond-side setting quite literally.

    Ms. Moore, who had been an editor and writer at Scholastic Books in Manhattan for over 40 years, knew when she was handed a good tale. “All the fortunate circumstances just fell into place. I thought, ‘This has to be a picture book.’ ”

    After editing the tale down from 40 pages to the standard 32 for a children’s book, she pitched it in script form to a friend who still worked at Scholastic. And then she waited. Book publishing apparently takes a long time. Two years later she received a contract that she was more than ready to sign.

    Ms. Carpenter has illustrated over 30 books for children, and was unavailable at first because she was working on other projects. But Ms. Moore, knowing her work, said the three-year wait would be worth it.

    During that time, though, Ms. Moore said she got a bit tired of waiting and told Scholastic that if the book wasn’t going to be published she wanted the rights back. Just when she thought things would get moving, Ms. Carpenter got pregnant. “Another delay,” Ms. Moore said, laughing, from her house in Montauk, where she has lived full time since 1998.

    Finally, in May 2010, she met with an editor and things progressed. She was asked how much editing an experienced editor needs. “Every writer needs an editor,” she emphatically stated.

    Ms. Moore’s children’s books include four in the Magic School Bus series, two anthologies, and a Bible! It’s a brightly illustrated children’s Bible published by Scholastic that retells the Old and New Testaments to make them clearer for children. When she writes, she sometimes sits on a double-seated glider in her spacious backyard, right next to a painted wooden shed that looks as if it could accommodate a fairy tale princess or family of talking rabbits.

    On Feb. 8, Ms. Moore received a letter notifying her that “Lucky Ducklings” had been named a Junior Library Guild selection for spring 2013. The letter states that the designation is unique, as it is given out early, often in advance of publication, and is viewed as a bellwether of future success. She received a lapel pin and plaque.

    Ms. Moore was also invited to be a guest at the American Library Association’s midwinter conference in Seattle. The book is doing so well, in fact, that she might just put aside the novel she has been working on about a 19th-century female artist to write another children’s book.

“All That Is”

James Salter

Knopf, $26.95

    In the kind of world James Salter writes about, the writer James Salter would no doubt be a household name. The characters in his novels, for the most part, seem to live on a different aesthetic plane from the rest of us. They know literature, wine, good food, the great cities of Western Europe, architecture, and a good deal about sensuality. In this enlightened universe, Mr. Salter’s fourth novel, “Light Years,” would be as widely read as the books of Tom Wolfe, say, and soccer moms in search of an erotic charge might pass around his third book, “A Sport and a Pastime,” rather than “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

   As it stands, though, the world is a far more parochial place, and James Salter the novelist remains in the margins of contemporary fiction — albeit with a very large asterisk, one reserved for writers who are not widely read but greatly admired. I can tell you that this is as tedious a sentence to write by now as it must be for James Salter to hear; this has been said too many times for too long. And yet it needs to be said — he is a truly great American writer who has somehow slipped through the cracks of the culture.

   His new novel, “All That Is” (his first in over 30 years), probably won’t do much to change this, though it does inch, grudgingly, toward a larger audience. It is perhaps the most approachable of his books. And then hope always springs eternal for the novelist; Mr. Salter turns 88 this June.

    As if propelled by this sense of encroaching time, “All That Is” begins, quite literally, with guns blazing, the first chapter a bravura rendering of World War II in the Pacific. We follow a 20-year-old Navy officer, Philip Bowman, during the Americans’ costly and excruciating march toward Japan. It is huge set piece compressed to miniature — a mere 10 pages — and yet Mr. Salter’s prose never allows the chapter to feel dashed off or superficial. Of the Japanese Navy, who are on a suicide mission, the author says, “They had written farewell letters home to their parents and wives and were sailing to their deaths. Find happiness with another, they wrote. Be proud of your son.” As the bombarded Japanese ship is ready to go down, he writes, “It was not a battle, it was a ritual, the death as of a huge beast brought down by repeated blows.”

    As the war ends, Bowman heads toward New York, the “great city,” in Mr. Salter’s eyes. There Bowman stumbles into publishing, and thereby begins the life that seems to stand for the author as the quintessential postwar American experience. There are the girls in P.J. Clarke’s, the office parties, great dinners, love affairs, marriage, divorce, the move to the suburbs, business trips to Europe, betrayal, and finally rebirth. This is the real subject of “All That Is”: the arc of a full life lived at the second half of the last century.

   Critics of Mr. Salter’s work — yes, there are a few — often take him to task for a kind of preciousness of style, if not mise-en-scene. For some, the premier cru Burgundy, the just placed flower vase, the luncheons out of a Manet painting, can smack of lifestyle writing. For others, the lyrical compression of his prose style can seem overwrought, if not pretentious. (Clearly I am not of this camp.) Either way, Mr. Salter’s new novel should temper these criticisms. The writer we encounter in “All That Is” is a less ecstatic one than the writer of “Light Years” and “A Sport and a Pastime,” both in its set pieces and its prose. There is a sober directness to this book, as if the author made a conscious effort, as William Faulkner once advised, to “kill all his darlings.”

    That is not to say the author has become pedestrian. For fans of the Salter flourish, “All That Is” holds plenty of gems: “Bowman was feeling the drinks himself. Among the brilliant bottles in the mirror behind the bar he could see himself, jacket and tie, New York evening, people around him, faces.” Soldiers in the Pacific are “slaughtered in enemy fire as dense as bees.” In the back of a taxicab with a woman, Bowman sees the Manhattan skyline in the distance, “a long necklace of light across the river.” And here is the editor Bowman at night: “He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.”

    You either respond to this sort of thing or you don’t. If you don’t, you may not find “All That Is” particularly nourishing. As ever, James Salter is a writer who exalts in the small moment, the brushstroked image. Excepting a scene of shocking sexual revenge toward the novel’s end, this is not a story of high-arcing trajectory; this is a realistic portrait of the ebb and flow of a postwar life. His hero, Philip Bowman, loves deeply, hurts deeply, and, like most of us, somehow endures. End of story. Yes, stylistically Mr. Salter has tempered, but as a dramatist, he has not changed — he meets you half way and no more.

    This, I believe, is the crux of what has kept this writer from the mainstream for so long. You need to know something of life, of experience, to enjoy Mr. Salter’s universe. You need to share some of his sensibilities. And, as with the very best novels, you need to bring some of yourself, your own riches, to the party, or risk being left to stand in the corner, feeling resentful of the others’ good time.

    For those who do respond, “All That Is” will be a novel of great pleasures. You will read it slowly, savoring passages, occasionally going back over a sentence that, like a crisp jab, catches you emotionally off-guard. Other moments you will see some of your own life passing before you on the page. Finally, you will be comforted that someone believes some of the same things you do, and lament the passing of a no less cruel, but somehow less juvenile, world.

    Then perhaps in a few years, you will run across the novel again and, remembering the pleasure it gave you, reread it to see if you can get some of those pleasures back, to convince yourself you were right about it the first time.

    And because of James Salter’s extraordinary and singular talents, you will be.

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

    James Salter lives in Bridgehampton.