Has a writer ever been more productive in death than Kurt Vonnegut? It’s a mini industry, from posthumous collections of his unpublished short fiction (“Look at the Birdie,” “While Mortals Sleep”) to the hefty Library of America volumes of his life’s work, the most recent of which, “Novels & Stories, 1950-1962,” came out in April. In October, Delacorte will release a book of his letters and Vanguard will publish “We Are What We Pretend to Be: First and Last Works.”

    And, somewhat under the radar, there came the slim “Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” (Melville House, $15.95).

    Oh, it’s all here, the irascibility and constant funk, for instance, great fun to read: “My country is in ruins. So I’m a fish in a poisoned fish bowl,” he told U.S. Airways magazine in June 2007. Or his World War II experience: “What they wanted when they successfully invaded Europe was a whole lot of riflemen to sweep across the continent. So that’s what I was. . . . The things I saw as a private — I wouldn’t miss it for anything.” So recorded the journal Stop Smiling in its August 2006 issue.

    His famously dim view of humanity is leavened with insight, as when, also in 2006, he spoke of the super rich and the White House leadership at the time: “They were born without a conscience. They’re psychopathic personalities. . . . They don’t care what happens next. They rise high in business because they’re so decisive.” Where a normal person might express some doubt, “A psychopath would say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. Bang.’ ”

    When it comes to writing, Vonnegut’s traditionalism is on display. “I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere,” he told The Paris Review in the book’s earliest interview, from 1977. “It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations. . . . If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade.”

    Vonnegut, who lived in Sagaponack all those many years, died in April 2007 at age 84, about two months after he spoke to In These Times for a brief online interview, his last. In it, he’s asked about his childhood in Indiana, which leads him to, of course, lament something — rampant loneliness, “the great American disease” — and yet his response has all the sweet nostalgia of Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries”: “And at Lake Maxinkuckee there were a row of cottages, one of which we owned, and so I was surrounded by relatives all of the time. You know, cousins, uncles and aunts. It was heaven.”

“The Great Moviemakers”

    “In a way it’s sort of like having filet mignon for dinner every night,” Steven Spielberg said in 1978 of his seven-year contract with Universal Studios. “You forget there’s Nathan’s on Ventura Boulevard, that there’s Carl’s Jr. . . .” That appreciation of the gravy train is from another book of conversations, George Stevens Jr.’s “The Next Generation” (Knopf, $39.95), which across 700 pages compiles interviews conducted at the American Film Institute with “The Great Moviemakers: From the 1950s to Hollywood Today.”

    The director goes on to explain the benefits of having television as a training ground before reminiscing about his breakthrough feature, “Duel,” in which Dennis Weaver is terrorized by a faceless, murderous trucker, and detailing at length the writing and shooting of his triumphant “Jaws.” “It’s probably a terrible thing to say,” he goes on, “but there were so many similarities between ‘Duel’ and ‘Jaws.’ I felt ‘Jaws’ would be the sequel to ‘Duel’ in disguise.” And an auteur is born.

    Mr. Spielberg, who has a house in East Hampton, is one of several movers and shakers in the movie biz who have or had a presence on the South Fork. Particularly of note are interviews with those who are no longer around to be interviewed, like Nora Ephron, who also lived here. She discusses her long transition from journalist to screenwriter to director of hit romantic comedies.

“Out of the Woods”

    It’s that time of year again — for a good walk spoiled. No, not golf. The sense is that you’re taking your life in your hands by so much as setting foot in any wooded area, crawling as they are with pestilent deer ticks. Is the solution really white tube socks pulled knee-high a la Dr. J of the old A.B.A. Nets?

    A new book by Katina Makris, a healer and homeopath, is mostly a memoir of a struggle with illness but also a guide book and resource for dealing with Lyme­ disease. In “Out of the Woods” (Elite Books, $18), Ms. Makris details years of torment at the hands of a mysterious ailment that she later learned was Lyme. It affected her family life and her work before spurring her to a campaign of research, activism, and alternative-medicine healing practices.

    Toward the back of the book is a compendium of useful information, from signs and symptoms to a discussion of bacteria and laboratory testing to an array of treatment options. Ms. Makris, a former East Hamptoner who now lives in New Hampshire, will speak about all things Lyme in two stops on the East End, at the library on deer tick central, Shelter Island, at 7 p.m. on Aug. 17, and the following day at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor at 5 p.m.

    Maybe you should listen up. That or take a cue from Woody Allen — just stay in and order Chinese.

“Masscult and Midcult”

Dwight Macdonald

New York Review Books, $16.95

   “Masscult and Midcult” gives us only one phase of Dwight Mac­donald’s storied career as a political gadfly, provocative journalist, nonpareil editor, and embattled critic. It showcases Macdonald as an endlessly entertaining highbrow scold, taking up the cudgels for literary standards, drawing a bead on misconceived cultural projects. His political writings may have dated but this side of his work remains well worth revisiting. Macdonald died 30 years ago but, as many reviewers seem to agree, this may be the liveliest collection of essays published this year.

     Born to modest privilege but not wealth in 1906, he went to Phillips Exeter and Yale in the 1920s and spent much of his later life trying to live this down. In college he was a precocious troublemaker, mocking a celebrated English professor as unqualified to teach and writing to Yale’s president to object to compulsory chapel for its banal sermons. He and some friends started a little magazine in the early ’30s while he was also writing mainstream profiles for Henry Luce’s new Fortune magazine. Radicalized by the Depression, he briefly became Trotskyist and in 1937 helped relaunch another quarterly, Partisan Review, devoted to anti-Stalinist radicalism and cutting-edge modern literature.

    By the 1940s the horrors of the war had turned him from a pacifist into a libertarian anarchist, and for five years he published his own magazine, the legendary Politics, that became a beacon of cosmopolitan humanism in a dark time. At the end of the decade he despaired of politics and turned instead to the cultural subjects that would soon give him a wider audience. The argumentative Macdonald was a lethal polemicist, and he had come to think of mass culture as the latest enemy of personal freedom and genuine art. Just as totalitarianism exacted a terrible conformity, he thought, the postwar avalanche of best-selling books, Hollywood movies, network television, pop music, and mass-market journalism had grown into a soft totalitarianism, undermining essential standards of language, taste, and creative expression. He signed on as a staff writer for The New Yorker and began mounting double-barreled assaults not so much on pop culture as on the well-meaning middlebrow culture of the 1950s, the world of the Book-of-the-Month Club, best-selling fiction, films with literary pretensions, reference works that did little more than decorate the shelves — all watered-down versions of real culture, as he saw it.

    Several of these terrifically enjoyable screeds are included here, including his attacks on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which dispensed with some of the poetic, archaic language of the King James Version; on Mortimer Adler’s monumental — and monumentally misconceived — Great Books collection; on James Gould Cozzens’s ridiculously overpraised novel “By Love Possessed,” and on the remarkably permissive third edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Along with this big game, the book’s editor, John Summers, reprints Macdonald’s sweeping but snobbish 70-page overview, “Masscult and Midcult,” along with some very effective literary essays on James Agee and Ernest Hemingway, whose self-imitating later work made him a ripe target for Macdonald, and two later attacks, on Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism and Norman Cousins’s new magazine, World, a short-lived successor to his echt middlebrow Saturday Review. Only Agee, an old friend of Macdonald’s who had recently died young, gets off easily in a balanced tribute. All the others bite the dust.

    Macdonald was a born contrarian who thrived on controversy. When he reprinted his essays he often appended harsh attacks on him along with his own feisty responses, which could be devastating but never bitter or malicious. But as a person, even with his own children (according to his biographer, Michael Wreszin), “he seemed unaware of the intimidating intensity of his verbal aggression.” A jovial, rotund man himself, he delighted in mischief and was surprised when anyone took his attacks personally. He took on his victims in the name of serious cultural ideals, pointing to how their nobler aspirations were betrayed, or their style was pretentious, clichéd, or riddled with cant. The trouble with popular culture, he felt, was that it was impersonal, mass-produced, mechanical, never the product of an individual vision, a vibrant imagination finding its own form. In both politics and cultural controversy he was the closest American equivalent of George Orwell, appealingly direct in his own writing, seeing himself as a guardian of the language but also of the gift of freedom that made honest language possible

    This double mission leads to a paradox in Macdonald’s work, for as much as he is a democrat and even a radical in politics, he is every inch the elitist in culture and the arts. He shares common ground with backward-looking social critics like T.S. Eliot and José Ortega y Gasset, prophets of decline who were implacable foes of mass society. Like them, Macdonald believed that “the great cultures of the past had all been elite affairs, centering in small upper-class communities which had certain standards in common,” encouraging creativity and criticism. He was sure there was a universal standard of excellence that clashed with the needs of a broad, undiscriminating audience. He identified with the minority appeal of early modern art and literature and hated to see its techniques diluted for mass consumption, though he allowed that some great writers of the past, like Dickens, had accidentally been popular.

    This is a key to the major flaw in his work, which struck me even as an undergraduate first reading Partisan Review some 50 years ago. Macdonald’s attachment to tradition, his idealized sense of the past, makes it difficult for him to discriminate — his own favorite word — among new directions in the present. He hated the ponderous but upbeat themes of most “serious” works of the 1950s like Cozzens’s overblown novel, Archibald MacLeish’s play “J.B.,” a verse update of the Book of Job, or Thornton Wilder’s ever-popular “Our Town.” But he was just as dismissive of the would-be radicals of the era: the Beats in America, the Angry Young Men in Britain. Macdonald claimed to admire Picasso but saw Jackson Pollock and his friends as “drip and dribble” painters.

    He loved the avant-garde only when it belonged safely to the past, when its spare intransigence was already hallowed by time. He revered the King James Bible as a grave monument of English poetry and prose, deeply integrated into the fabric of later literature, but could not acknowledge how much its archaisms, obscurities, and mistranslations needed respectful correction and clarification, especially where the original was pithy, direct. To him such “trivial gains in accuracy” are not worth the loss of “long-cherished beauty of phrasing.” Yet those gains were anything but trivial, and much of the hallowed phrasing was preserved. His attack on the new dictionary, though in many ways justified, was even more of a rear-guard action. Multiplying example after example, Macdonald wins every local skirmish but loses the war. The day was past when a dictionary could serve as the sovereign arbiter of usage rather than an alert recorder of how the living language continued to evolve.

    Macdonald was most effective on easier targets. As a matchless critic of style, he could deftly puncture Norman Cousins’s gaseous editorial statements or the other Cozzens’s arch, pompous language. In Cozzens he detects the prig under the cover of the moralist. He calls “By Love Possessed” a “neo-Victorian cakewalk” and demolishes its gullible reviewers: “Confusing laboriousness with profundity, the reviewers have for the most part not detected the imposture.” The impact of Macdonald’s meticulous takedown was immediate. Rarely has a single review so deflated a writer’s reputation, yet Macdonald happily sent the piece to Cozzens himself — in case he missed it, as if any writer ever missed the current buzz about his work. Macdonald could be ingenious even in overkill, as when he compares the Bible revisers’ work to the saturation bombing of German cities, leaving large monuments intact while leveling all that surrounded them.

    Macdonald’s one-liners still resonate. He wonders why Hollywood moguls are called producers “when their function is to prevent the production of art.” They charge screenwriters with “licking the book,” like bears licking their cubs, but here “the process is reversed and the book is licked not into but out of shape.” Of Time magazine he writes: “As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking.” Anticipating current criticisms of the Internet, he complains about the proliferation of newspapers and magazines for substituting facts and information for thinking and imagination, and even compares reading this mountain of material to the work of a calculating machine, an ancestor of today’s computers. “This gives a greatly extended coverage to our minds, but also makes them, compared to the kinds of minds similar people had in past centuries, coarse, shallow, passive, and unoriginal.” Amid these distractions, he concludes, “the real problem of our day is how to escape being ‘well informed,’ how to resist the temptation to acquire too much information.” Sound familiar?

    Macdonald is right to say that the real challenge is not wide reading, which he feels has deteriorated into skimming, but deep reading, “to bring the slow, cumbersome depths into play, to ruminate, speculate, reflect, wonder, experience what the eye has seen.” This is usually the mandate of art rather than journalism or information, and no computer can supply it any more than Time could. But the arts themselves, much like language, were evolving in Macdonald’s day, and his stubborn adherence to the past, his belief in continuity or slow change, kept him from appreciating this.

    The very distinctions between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow that he tried so hard to uphold were falling apart. The arts and even the politics of the 1960s made no sense in terms of these cultural hierarchies. The songs of Dylan or the Beatles, the films of Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, and Robert Altman, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg or Roy Lichtenstein, the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, or Kurt Vonnegut — all these bridged or shattered such tenuous distinctions.

    Macdonald’s values are sound yet his essays survive less for what they say, which is too often anchored in an idealized past, than for how they say it: their wit and rhetorical verve, their uproarious satire and sheer love of disputation, the way they marshal unanswerable facts and embarrassing quotations. His designated victims often hang themselves as he chuckles from the sidelines. Great satirists and parodists rarely swim with the tide. From Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh, they gained their energy, as he does, from their articulate distaste for the newfangled. And as he says about one of his favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, “while his works are sometimes absurd, they are rarely dull.”

    Morris Dickstein’s most recent book is “Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.” He lives in Sag Harbor.

    Dwight Macdonald was a longtime resident of Amagansett.

“All My Georgias”

    Living history will walk through the East Hampton Library’s heavy wooden door on Saturday when Redjeb Jordania of Springs arrives to read from his new memoir, “All My Georgias.” His father was the first president of Georgia. In 1921 his family and the entire government fled to France, where Mr. Jordania was born, to escape the Soviet occupation.

    The book is broken into 12 true tales that together tell the story of Mr. Jordania’s eventful life in the 20th century. Recounted are scenes from the Georgian colony of émigrés in Paris, family life, the persistence of culture in wartime (one music lesson is conducted while German bombs fall), and a close call with a K.G.B. agent. He at last returned to Georgia in 1990, going on to see the country regain its independence.

    The reading starts at 3 p.m. The library has requested registration in advance with the reference desk.

Safina All Over

    What’s it like to take a writing workshop with one of the country’s foremost nature writers? A chance to find out will present itself tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, when the shop’s Cultural Cafe continues its masters workshop series with Carl Safina. A small group and an intimate setting have been promised. Registration in advance is a must.

    A MacArthur fellow and founder of the Blue Ocean Institute in Cold Spring Harbor, Mr. Safina is the author, most recently, of “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World,” Lazy Point being on Napeague and that view being out his back window. It won an Orion Book Award not long ago. His other books include “Song for the Blue Ocean” and “A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout.”

    Mr. Safina, by the way, will be the Authors After Hours guest at the Amagansett Library on Saturday at 6 p.m., reading from “The View From Lazy Point.”

Authors Night Nears

    Tickets have gone on sale for Authors Night at the East Hampton Library on Aug. 11. The benefit for the library brings scores of writers together under a tent, this year at the Gardiner farm at 36 James Lane in East Hampton, where a reception will begin at 5 p.m. with hors d’oeuvres, flowing wine, and no end of books to buy or have signed. Authors on hand will range from Peter Matthiessen to Philip Galanes, from Ali Wentworth to Kati Marton, and Roberts Lipsyte and Klein.

    After the reception, at 8 p.m., attendees can repair to dinner parties hosted by writers at various homes here. Tickets to those dinners cost between $100 and $2,500 and are available at the library or online at authorsnight.org.

For the New Review

    Two literary heavyweights, Billy Collins and Roger Rosenblatt, will give a reading tomorrow to announce the release of the summer issue of The Southampton Review, produced through Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in writing and literature and headed up by Lou Ann Walker.

    Mr. Collins — need it be said? — is a former U.S. poet laureate and arguably the country’s most popular poet. Mr. Rosenblatt, who lives in Quogue, is the equally popular author of memoirs (“Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning”) and novels (“Lapham Rising,” “Beet”). The reading, one of the Summer Arts Southampton events that are free and open to the public, starts at 7:30 p.m. in the campus’s Avram Theater.

CMEE Gets Bookish

    The Children’s Museum of the East End in Bridgehampton has started a summer book club that meets for readings in the homes of museum members who are also children’s book authors. The next gathering will be on Tuesday at 8 p.m., and the book is “I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag” by Jennifer Gilbert. A $25 donation to CMEE gets you a book. Sign-up is by phone with the museum.

“Buried on Avenue B”

Peter de Jonge

Harper, $25.99

  “Shamelessly squeaking the tires, Wawrinka one-hands the Crown Vic through the tight turns of the basement garage.” That evocative little sentence might not be the one Peter de Jonge is most proud of in his new crime novel, “Buried on Avenue B,” but it does the neat trick of communicating fun in triplicate — for the reader, the writer, and the character behind the wheel.

    Mr. de Jonge clearly enjoys himself throughout this police procedural, and it makes all the difference. The book is peppered with commentary on the way we live now: “. . . she is reminded that a cineplex is a theater showcasing a long list of movies none of which you want to see.” Greasy food wrappers in the foot well of an abandoned van represent “the major enablers of American obesity.” “Community has become trendy,” someone says of a shared garden plot. “At least in the East Village.”

    The East Village is where the story begins, when an addled old junkie and his Caribbean helpmate claim that a hulking black man he killed is buried in that community garden. What’s actually dug up, however, is the body of a blond boy who’s at most 10. As an investigation takes its first methodical steps, we also get something of a Lower East Side travelogue lamenting gentrification.

    “Classic dive bars should get landmark status preventing anyone from selling frozen yogurt within fifty feet of them on either side,” says our guide and heroine, Detective Darlene O’Hara. (Wawrinka, the automotive enthusiast, is a tattooed lesbian, half Hawaiian, half Polish, who becomes her sidekick for a time.) New to the homicide squad, O’Hara “considers her privileged access to fringe New York one of the perks of her job, and has never had a boring conversation with a drag queen or trannie.”

    In her mid-30s, the detective lives in an apartment in the Bronx, drives a crappy VW Jetta, and wears a Casio on her wrist, but, somewhat less drearily, she’s got lots of red hair and a smattering of freckles, and “buries her ample curves under Clintonian pantsuits and reinforces the dowdy effect with self-administered haircuts and rubber-soled shoes.” Or, through the eyes of one pot-puffing skate punk: “Uncool jeans — check. Uncool hair — check. Uncool shoes — big, fat check.”

   If he only knew. O’Hara likes to begin her workday with an 8 a.m. vodka and grapefruit juice at Milano’s, a downtown hole-in-the-wall remarkable for its “ghostly chiaroscuro” and “the studious way” the other regulars “apply themselves to their beverages. . . .” (A fellow detective regularly greets her at the office with a breath mint.)

    In that way she’s reminiscent of Matthew Scudder, Lawrence Block’s private investigator, whose first appearance in “The Sins of the Fathers” came as a revelation for the sheer number of pages where he’s simply sitting in bars and coffee shops. O’Hara is equally appealing, if less downbeat. Like Scudder slipping into an empty cathedral, she seeks out quiet places for a respite, to think.

    “What does it mean, she wonders, that she now delights in silence . . . and that libraries are up there next to dive bars on her list of favorite places?” Her leads having taken her to the seedy side of Sarasota, Fla., she closes herself in a library’s phone booth and sleeps for 40 minutes.

    When it comes to her pursuit of the perps, whether you’re the type to try to anticipate what’s around the next corner or prefer to sit back and take in the parade of lowlifes, the twists are sufficient and surprising and not to be revealed here. Are coincidences worthy of Dickens or John Irving tossed into the plot? Sure, but as the authorial voice reminds us, “a fundamental axiom of investigative work . . . is that there are no coincidences.”

    As a writer, Mr. de Jonge has an easy way about him — no seams, no labored descriptions, seemingly no effort. Helped by uniformly short chapters, these might be the fastest 308 pages you’ll read.

    The repeated door knocks and interviews with suspects inevitably call to mind the “Law & Order” TV franchise (speaking of the way we live now). But that ingrained model’s pretty irresistible, so is that really a complaint? Police procedurals tap into the same kind of human need for stories and tension and release that sports do — the variety and unexpected outcomes are contained, circumscribed by form, time, rules.

    “Buried on Avenue B” is a follow-up to “Shadows Still Remain,” Mr. de Jonge’s first novel after collaborating with James Patterson on two thrillers set out here, “The Beach House” and “Beach Road.” One holdover character is O’Hara’s son, who has dropped out of college on the West Coast and returned home to start a band. She was all of 15 when she had him. The fact that O’Hara is a mother makes her determination to find out what happened to the dead boy that much more intense, of course, but still, this reader would’ve happily done without the 20-something and his band’s shows at the clubs.

    Or is that a selfish desire to spend more time alone with Darlene?

    Peter de Jonge is a regular visitor to East Hampton. He writes and does research at the East Hampton Library.

“Vanished in the Dunes”

Allan Retzky

Oceanview Publishing, $25.95

   In this exquisitely neurotic tale of sex, murder, and guile, the author gives the East Hampton police investigator a special name, Detective Peter Wisdom. Detective Wisdom may be the most sensible character in the book, but for all his canny, down-home instincts, a disappearance and presumed murder goes unsolved for months.

    Nevertheless, Detective Wisdom is invaluable for his virtues — his patience, his trained eye, and his balanced restraint. Detective Wisdom is the benchmark for normalcy. Nearly every other character in the book is either crazy or being driven that way. Sex, sexual obsession, love and love unrequited, and vengeance are the driving forces.

   “Vanished in the Dunes” by Allan Retzky is a looking glass into crisis-driven circumstances that successful people have brought upon themselves. As the pages turn, it becomes a convoluted, unpredictable morality play. Writing in an edgy present tense, Mr. Retzky invites the reader to track the machinations, manipulations, and obsessions of characters who drive themselves first to extremes, then to crime.

    Behind the masks of normalcy, opulence, and refinement lies a fractured moral center. In this book, promiscuity and temptation have disastrous ramifications. All of this unfolds against a Hamptonized backdrop easy to recognize, from the Jitney stop in front of Victoria’s Secret on East 86th Street to shopping at Citarella, a bran muffin at Starbucks, and the dangerous curves of Old Montauk Highway.

    The novel centers on one Amos Posner, a despondent ex-commodities trader who is under federal investigation for irregularities, that is, serial bribery. His wife is on the brink of leaving him for suspected infidelities. She continues practicing law in New York while Posner licks his wounds in their sumptuous Amagansett beach house, where “the smallest thing can set him off into an orbit of worry. . . .”

    Like his felonious blunders in business, Posner’s problems are of his own making. But it is guilt that sickens him. Still, against his own best instincts, he invites a wantonly seductive stranger into his house, one he encountered on the Jitney. One who shouldn’t be there in more ways than he could guess. The story accelerates into a finely crafted riddle with more sinister loose ends than a plate of spaghetti.

    Mr. Retzky taps into the thoughts and disturbances of his characters’ emotional and rational (or irrational) goings-on. They come alive because he does more than write their dialogue; he eavesdrops on their innermost thinking, putting it into words we can read. This clairvoyance about sexual obsession, rage, vengeance, guilt, and ever-stalking anxiety provide the internal landscape for his people.

    Characters move through the story as if guided by robotic malfeasance and furtive desperation. An attraction to wrongdoing is part of their DNA. Even Detective Wisdom’s boss, who is trying to quit smoking, is fighting temptation.

    The author takes great pains to explain their reasoning, and, if necessary, he will cast light on biographical childhood trauma. This may be a cerebral book, but in such lavish and lofty surroundings, mostly in Amagansett, it is also an occasionally smutty one. It would have to be in order to depict the decadent seepage beneath higher civilization.

    In one snippet, vulnerability to temptation goes like this:

     “Perhaps some red wine,” she suggests.

     “I guess I can do that,” he says, but there is edginess in his answer. He feels as if he is sliding into a deep pit without a handhold.

     . . . She reallocates her skirt so that he has a clear view of her browned upper thigh. She spreads her legs more than slightly. The invitation is clear.

    And here, for example, he describes the thoughts of Dr. Henry Stern, a radiologist: “He has learned to control his emotions when he speaks with patients and their primary care physicians. He has built up a wall of false bravado during such conversations, always faking the positive, which will give them a tortured future of discomfort and occasional pain as well as hope.”

    A few minutes later, the same mas­ter of manipulation “begins to sense he is lost. Utterly lost or bewitched, it ­doesn’t­ matter.” The book brims with inventiveness like this.

    None of these internal monologues are stagnant. They open windows onto the characters’ sins, fears, murderous plots, or plain craziness. In addition to which, Mr. Retzky gives us gunplay, car chases, sexual abuse, murderous rage, and a grasp of language that is nuanced and deadly precise.

    The author’s economy, vertiginous plot twists, colorful dialogue, and blindsiding surprises cram huge entertainment into only 224 pages. “Vanished in the Dunes” has the appearance of light reading, but it carries heavy freight. Neurotic compulsions, guilty pleasures, sins of omission, toying with temptation — all of these are linked to the human propensity for making disastrous choices over small-seeming matters. This is not just a book about good and evil, but about recognizing both, then choosing one over the other.

    Allan Retzky is a conspicuously fine writer and a clever one. The ending is brilliantly conceived. It is amazing how much trouble can unreel from one tiny indiscretion.

    Jeane Bice is a writer who lives in Springs.

    Allan Retzky, who lives in Amagansett, will read from “Vanished in the Dunes” on Aug. 4 at 2 p.m. at the Montauk Bookshop and on Aug. 18 at 6 p.m. at the Amagansett Library.

   James Joyce enthusiasts will commemorate the author’s life and his novel “Ulysses” on Saturday at a Bloomsday celebration at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. A “Joyce-inspired performance”  with Joyce portrayed by Mark Singer, an actor and vocalist, will be part of it.

    “Ulysses” follows the events of an ordinary day in the life of the fictional character Leopold Bloom in his home city of Dublin. The title refers to the hero of Homer’s “Odyssey,” and there are parallels between characters and events in both works.

    Bloom is the only child of a Hungarian-Jewish father and an Irish-Protestant mother. The novel shows every aspect of his life and personality, positive as well as negative, and follows him from 8 a.m. on June 16 to the early hours of June 17, 1904.

    Joyceans celebrate Bloomsday each year on June 16 with re-enactments, performances, readings, and other events. It is believed that Joyce chose June 16 to commemorate the day of his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

    The first Bloomsday celebration took place in Ireland in 1954 on the 50th anniversary of Leopold’s now-famous day. Two writers, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien, visited locations from the book, reading parts of it and drinking at pubs along the way. It is said that the original celebration ended when the writers became too drunk and began to heatedly debate the novel’s meaning.

    Last year, for the first time, thousands of Bloomsday enthusiasts followed @11ysses on Twitter as “Ulysses” was summarized and tweeted 140 characters at a time. Each tweet represented eight pages of the book.

    The South Fork has been home to many Irish immigrants and, of course, numerous writers. “There is a sense of the idyllic, of the melding of Old World with the New that draws writers here,” said Douglas Light, who will be reading from his novel “East Fifth Bliss” at the Bloomsday celebration.

    John McCaffrey, a writer with family roots in Wainscott, will also read. “My grandmother and grandfather came from Ireland and found a lasting home on the eastern end of Long Island,” he said. “The work that I’m going to read is about my grandparents and about their assimilation here.”

    Mr. McCaffrey said he plans to get into the spirit at Canio’s by wearing an Edwardian costume. “I encourage everyone to” dress in costume, he said. “We just want people to come and have a good time.” The free event starts at 5 p.m.

Poetry Pops Up

    Poets, prick up your ears: A new venue to air your verse has made itself available, open mike and all. On Tuesday starting at 5:30 p.m., Phao restaurant on Main Street in Sag Harbor will inaugurate Poets’ Prix Fixe with a couple of journal-published East End writers, Lucas Hunt and Michelle Whittaker, both of them associated with the M.F.A. program in Southampton. The organizer is Teri Kennedy, known for putting together shows of performance art and readings at Ashawagh Hall in Springs.

    Mr. Hunt, Corn Belt-bred, came out last year with his second volume of poems, “Light on the Concrete,” from the North Sea Press. Ms. Whittaker has won a Pushcart Prize honorable mention. The artist Michelle Murphy, for one, has signed on to read, and for those who might feel microphone jitters, a free beer or glass of wine awaits as enticement.

    Also in Sag Harbor, farther up and across Main Street, Mr. Hunt has rounded up other poets for a gathering at BookHampton on Sunday: Rosalind Brenner, whose new book is called “All That’s Left: Poems and Paintings,” Kathryn Levy, the founder of the Poetry Exchange and the New York City Ballet Poetry Project, and Matt Frazier, whose first collection is to be published by the Spring Press. The readings start at 4 p.m.

“Vanished in the Dunes”

    In the mood for a thriller set in familiar environs, rendering them strange and new? “Vanished in the Dunes: A Hamptons Mystery” might fit the bill. It’s the debut novel by Allan Retzky of Amagansett, and he’ll read from it on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. Take a businessman recently scapegoated and canned from his international trading firm and a beautiful resident in psychiatry at a Manhattan hospital, toss them together in a Hampton Jitney, and stir.

    Oceanview Publishing will officially release the book around the Fourth of July.

“A Mind of Winter”

Shira Nayman

Akashic Books, $15.95

    “I do not fail to see the irony in it — being taken, once again, for someone else.” So begins “A Mind of Winter,” the second novel by Shira Nayman. It commences like one of those P.O.V. video games where one sees out of and controls the movements of the viewfinder (all too often in video games, over the barrel of a gun) but one cannot see oneself. We, the readers, do not know if the first-person narrator is male, female, young, or old. The narrator is nameless. We see out of his or her eyes without knowing who is steering our perspective. Clearly this is intentional, as the book is, foremost, about identity: mistaken, taken, lost, sought after, invented, constructed, and found.

    The novel takes place, mostly, in the decade following World War II. It is (somewhat confusingly) discontinuous in chronology, geography, and narration. The locale jumps from the North Shore of Long Island to Shanghai to London to Germany and back, while at the same time switching from the 1950s to the late ’40s to the war years and back. Each of the first-person narrators (there are three: “Oscar,” Christine, and Marilyn) tells a part of the story, but because the narrators are inventing new or improved personas out of their pasts, and each has reasons for dissembling, hiding, and manipulating both the past and the present, the storyline becomes blurred and confused. Add to this the fact that Christine, during much of her narration, is falling into the tunnel of opium addiction, so her view of events begins to feel slippery, obscure, addled, and dark.

    Oscar tells us in his prologue (summer 1951, Long Island): “We could not be more different from one another — Christine, Marilyn, and I. And yet, I see us as three comparable figures, up against the same squall. Only this too: I may be battling alongside them, but I am also the eye of the storm, the terrible, still center. Not merely one of the hurricane’s combatants, but somehow also its source, and therefore, as it happens, a void, which is to say, nothing at all.”

    Oscar also informs us: “I stand accused of murder. A crime of war. A crime, to be precise, against Humanity.” We do not know if he is guilty of the crime, we do not know what the crime is. We don’t know if there are extenuating circumstances. We don’t even know if he actually did the thing he is accused of. And it is not until the very last pages of the book that we get even an inkling of just what it is he might be accused of. But the accusation hangs over the novel like a sword of Damocles. Is Oscar, who started as Robert and becomes a Harcourt, a Nazi? Whom did he murder? During the war? After?

    The next section takes place four years earlier in Shanghai. It is mostly concerned with the British-American expatriate community. Christine narrates. She smokes opium with Barnaby, her lover. His use of the drug is clearly casual and recreational. Her need for the pipe is a physical discomfort. She is twitchy and greedy for it. Eventually, the opium that he brings to share with her is not sufficient for her deeper needs, and she must go to Han Shu’s cafe, one of Shanghai’s opium dens, to actually buy it.

    Christine is a beautiful Englishwoman. But she is down on her luck and running out of money. Her landlord wants the rent, and her clothes are getting shabby and dirty. She smokes more and more opium and one begins to fear that she will have to become a prostitute to support her habit. Instead, at least for a while, she makes an accommodation with Han Shu and becomes a kind of madam/English teacher to his harem of barely pubescent Chinese prostitutes. In return for teaching them spoken English, literature, and manners, she gets room, board, and enough opium to lose herself in a hallucinogenic haze every evening. She eventually takes Han Shu as a lover. The irony here is that Christine’s mother was a kind of casual prostitute, taking in different men all the time.

   The gentlemen were always gone by the time I awoke, and my mother would be transformed — hair in pins and rags, bustling about the small kitchen, tending to eggs sizzling in lard, the loose housedress only emphasizing her lovely shape. . . .

   And when the men started coming into my tiny, private space — occasions when the gentlemen lavished on my mother too many glasses of the amber stuff, so that she would end up draped across the green brocade couch. . . .

    But what Christine tells Robert of her childhood is none of this. She creates a false self, a lovely and gentle story about an innocent little girl in a white cotton dress. We don’t know at this point that Robert is also a false self.

    In the next section of the novel, we are returned to Long Island in 1951, but now the narrator is Marilyn, who, we are told by other characters, physically resembles Christine. Marilyn is a wartime photographer putting together a book of the wartime photos of others. She is married to Simon but living at Oscar’s North Shore mansion and having an affair with Barnaby. Of necessity, Marilyn too has a false self: the one that she presents to her husband, and even the one that she shows Barnaby. He tells her ironically, “As for the truth quotient: that’s not for me to judge. Besides, isn’t that the business you’re in? The photographer, going about the world with a camera — teasing the truth out of things?”

    While Marilyn and Barnaby are sneaking about the mansion and its grounds, meeting for secret trysts even while her husband is present, there is someone else sneaking around too. At first Marilyn wonders if it is Simon, trying to spy on her. But eventually she learns that it is someone from the Department of Justice, the Office of Special Investigations. These agents investigate war crimes. He is meeting secretly with Oscar, and sometimes they speak in German. The mystery mounts.

    The writing in “A Mind of Winter” is sometimes quite poetic and lovely. When Oscar is taken in by an English family whose son, whom he resembles, died in the war, he says, “You might think that my precipitous success in the [family] company was spurred by a desire to repay my hosts and mentors for their extreme generosity and faith. I wish I could claim this as a motive. The truth is, I was driven by what felt like a demon: ugly and vengeful, greedy and frothing with lust. A demon with appetites I did not understand or care to understand.”

    “A Mind of Winter” is a novel filled with false selves, falsehoods, and layers of lies and deceits. At one point Oscar muses, “Does the erasure of deceit result in the revelation of truth?” I suspect that is Ms. Nayman’s very own question, and one that she handled . . . deceptively herself. As the author, she withholds much information until the very end of the book. We are left very much in the dark about essential elements of the story, especially the particulars of Oscar’s history. It seems information that is coy to withhold.

    Shira Nayman is a clinical psychologist who has taught literature at Columbia and psychology at Rutgers. She lives in Brooklyn.

    Michael Z. Jody, a psychoanalyst and couples counselor in New York City and Amagansett, regularly contributes book reviews to The Star.

“The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat”

Thomas McNamee

Free Press, $27

   When Craig Claiborne put his East Hampton house up for sale in 1988, the real estate agent included a long list of professional restaurant equipment in the “once-in-a-lifetime kitchen.” Apart from the many food columns, restaurant reviews, and best-selling cookbooks that made Claiborne’s reputation, the kitchen was about all he had left to show for his decades as food editor of The New York Times. It was largely paid for by The Times, proof of his success and his value, and it was where all those memorable meals were prepared by star chefs and consumed by notable guests.

    For an asking price of $885,000, the atypical house on Clamshell Avenue facing Hand’s Creek was built to Claiborne’s plans in 1979. The kitchen had a stainless-steel Chinese roast pork oven, Salamander broiler, Simac “Gelatio” ice cream maker, Traulsen refrigeration, and 500-bottle wine closet. It was a kitchen wagging a house. Even by today’s measure, the space anchored by a 10-foot marble work island under a skylight would make Mario Batali wet his “Fanta pants” with excitement.

     Claiborne had just definitively retired from The Times in 1988 when he tried unsuccessfully to sell the house. The food newsletter he once produced with the late Pierre Franey, his longtime Times colleague and East Hampton neighbor, had failed. The food world already had started to change around him. He needed to reinvent himself. Instead, as we see in “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat” by Thomas McNamee, he continued a sad decline.

    Reading this first comprehensive account of Claiborne’s life to appear since his death in 2000, it seems that he’s been given a somewhat ambiguous legacy 50 years after publishing his first column for The Times. In a world that has become so obsessed with food and dining, why did it take so long for someone to tell the story of someone so influential in what Mr. McNamee calls the “American food renaissance”? Why was Mr. McNamee, with only one other book in this genre to his credit — about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse — the one to write it?

    No one doubts the extraordinary degree to which Claiborne changed what and how we eat today. Mr. McNamee accurately points out that it helped him to have the power of The Times behind him. Still, Claiborne set his own high standards that — at least before today’s food blogging free-for-all — were previously unimaginable. It’s difficult to measure his full contribution, not just to diners but to the food and hospitality trade.

    Does it say as much about Claiborne’s contribution as it does about how his public, peers, and subjects ultimately perceived him that only now do we have a (sort of) definitive book about him? Has the rush to celebrity chef status and all its TV trappings reached such intensity that it has diminished Claiborne’s legacy so quickly? Or, as Mr. McNamee’s research attests, after years of not too successfully hiding his condescension is Claiborne seated in the restaurant equivalent of Siberia?

    Perhaps that’s why Henri Soulé and his Le Pavillon restaurant in New York City (and brief summer outpost at the Hedges in East Hampton) were Claiborne’s ideals for fine French dining. Mr. McNamee shows us that Soulé was as much a dominant influence on Claiborne as his early studies at the Ecole Hoteliere de la Société Suisse des Hoteliers in Lausanne, Switzerland. Claiborne saw Soulé as the real thing, an imperious bearer of standards for classic French cuisine in a room governed by impeccable service — if not snobbism. In Soulé, Claiborne may unwittingly have come across the monster he was to help create in today’s egomaniacal TV celebrity chefs.

    So what sort of monster has Claiborne created 50 years on? Take Scott Conan, the recent subject of a “Power Dressing” column in The Financial Times. Conan is 41, a U.S. chef, television personality, and cookbook author with six restaurants across this country and Canada. He’s been host of “24-hour Restaurant Battle” on the Food Network and is a judge on “Chopped.” Describing his shirt, Conan the power dresser informs us: “This is a light blue cotton, and woven inside the twill-like fabric is a darker blue. All my clothes are made to measure. I’m not just in the restaurant business; they’re quality restaurants so the shirt is representative.”

    We can only imagine what Craig would say if he were around to read this sort of thing. Perhaps, “I’ll have what he’s wearing.”

    Of all the people who could have written this book, why Mr. McNamee? To answer that you’d have to ask a long list of people who might have more deeply captured the era and the man. Gael Greene, for one, could have given us more zest and feel for her subject. Maybe there just wasn’t all that much material in the end. Were there too many falling-outs for anyone that close to him to want to put it all back together again? As informative as “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat” can be, someday someone should delve more deeply into the social context that is the real payoff in what Claiborne accomplished for people and how they eat.

    For now, Mr. McNamee gives us an accurate chronological account of a life and the people who were close to it before Claiborne’s darkness alienated them. He was frustrated in love and in not being able to live freely gay for much of his life. He drank a lot, and he largely ignored his deteriorating health later on.

    In contrast to his subject’s élan, Mr. McNamee’s style is clunky and colloquial at times. There are stretches when he marshals so much information that the maddening signature of Zagat’s guide reviews comes to mind: Some readers will enjoy the accounts of feuding chefs, others will cringe at the attempts to put Claiborne’s sexuality into context.

    In more than a few places Mr. McNamee’s references to food and cooking can seem more researched than knowledgeable. Other sections read as though he spent too much time in Claiborne’s archives rather than talking to people about him. We loved what Claiborne had to teach us, but everyone agreed that his writing mostly had the fluidity of a starched white napkin draped over a waiter’s forearm.

    The book’s notes, credits, and index will be a helpful resource for those in the younger “Top Chef” generation who may just now be discovering Claiborne. Some of the detail seems included for the sake of proving that the research is ironclad. For those of us in East Hampton, it’s nice to know that Jacques Franey’s birthday is June 30 so we could wish him well when channeling his father, Pierre, at Domaine Franey Wines & Spirits on Pantigo Road. Among others, Mr. McNamee spoke extensively to Jacques’s sister, Diane, for the book.

    Leaving no heirs, Claiborne left his estate to his great love, Jim Dinneen, and to the Culinary Institute of America, where a bookstore and scholarship fund bear his name. It was a fitting legacy from someone who long ago saw the value of such an institute in America — much the way Claiborne’s studies in Lausanne formed the approach to food and service he would keep forever.

    While carefully describing the bitterness Claiborne never eluded, Mr. McNamee still makes sure Claiborne’s great kindness, generosity, and encouragement for others are given credit. Beyond helping Pierre Franey gain prominence, he backed Mimi Sheraton to become The Times restaurant critic, guided Marcella Hazan to produce one of the best Italian cookbooks ever written, and was the first to discover many other household names in the food business today.

    As a side note, when I was a reporter for this newspaper in 1989 I got a call from Craig. He liked a piece I wrote about his Clamshell Avenue house being for sale. Would I organize the notes he’d been collecting for a book? We met at the house, I agreed, and I helped edit his last published book, “Elements of Etiquette: A Guide to Table Manners in an Imperfect World” (2001).

    I don’t remember what he served at the first meal I had with Claiborne and Jim at the house, but I do recall the wine. It was a Simi Valley chardonnay I still buy today. Knowing about the famous $4,000 meal he and Pierre Franey shared in Paris in 1975 to stick it to American Express after winning a PBS auction, I had expected a bigger bottle, maybe a white Burgundy. No, the surprisingly crisp Californian was a sign of Craig’s egalitarian appreciation and respect for what was simply good.

    Aside from its weak spots, Mr. McNamee’s book ultimately brings a complex and reserved man into accurate focus. We’re left with someone whose great achievements were overshadowed by loneliness and sadness. We wish he could have been a little less ahead of his time — for himself, and for us. In this era of “vibe dining” establishments and retina-exploding presentation, we could use a little more Claiborne.

    Eric Kuhn is a former reporter and news editor for The Star. He has lived in Paris since 2000.

    Thomas McNamee lives in San Francisco.

   So how’s the East End market for literary readings? Strong? Steady? Saturated? Is the top-flight quality outpacing demand, or driven by it, and not just by the bursting supply of name authors here?

    An S.P.O. (seasonal public offering) on July 14 at the Amagansett Library will start off a series of half a dozen Saturday evening visits by writers with books in hand, joining or competing with Canio’s Cultural Cafe in Sag Harbor, Fridays at Five in Bridgehampton, BookHampton’s regular events across its four shops, the readings at the bucolic Quogue Library and occasionally at the East Hampton Library and Rogers Memorial in Southampton, and, over at the Marine Museum in Amagansett, the Poetry Marathon, which returns on Sunday at 5 p.m., when Anne Sager and the playwright Joe Pintauro step to the lectern.

    Authors After Hours is the name, and it will open with Louis Begley on the 14th, reading from “Schmidt Steps Back,” the latest of his Schmidt novels. Hilma Wolitzer will follow on the 21st with her new novel of late-life romance, “An Available Man,” well reviewed in The New York Times, and on the 28th Carl Safina will elaborate on “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World.”

    Aug. 4 brings Roger Rosenblatt cracking the spine of his most recent memoir, “Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats,” a follow-up to his tale of family loss, “Making Toast.” On the 18th, Allan Retzky of Amagansett will give an airing to his spanking-new debut novel, “Vanished in the Dunes,” a thriller. And the series concludes on Aug. 25 with the science writer Dava Sobel and “A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos.”

    The readings start at 6 p.m. and are free.