Orion Award for Safina

    “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World” by Carl Safina won the 2012 Orion Book Award last week. The award recognizes “the book’s success in addressing the human relationship with the natural world in a fresh, thought-provoking, and engaging manner,” according to a release from Orion, an environmental, literary, and cultural magazine out of Great Barrington, Mass.

    Mr. Safina, who lives on Napeague, is president and co-founder of the Blue Ocean Institute in Cold Spring Harbor. His previous books include “Song for the Blue Ocean” and “A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Blowout.” Among the finalists were “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell and “Fire Season” by Philip Connors.

The Mom Egg Rolls In

    Poetry fans, mothers, and those attuned to that holiday on Sunday that you’d best not neglect, take note: The new issue of a literary journal called The Mom Egg is not only out, it features the poetry of Kathy Engel — Sagaponacker, N.Y.U. professor, Hayground School founder.

    In addition to poems, The Mom Egg features fiction, creative nonfiction, and art by mothers and about motherhood. This particular issue focuses on the body, from image to sexuality to matters of reproduction.

  “Long Island Noir”

Edited by Kaylie Jones

Akashic Books, $15.95

    What exactly is noir? The French film critics who coined the label for a particular string of ’50s hard-boiled American melodramas such as “Double Indemnity” described it as “oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel.” I also think noir, be it movie or story, needs to create a certain discomfort, an unease that doesn’t come with a straightforward thriller or whodunit.

    “Long Island Noir,” an anthology of short stories edited by Kaylie Jones, presents some good examples of noir, some noir lite, and a couple of cheerfully transgressive romps that barely make it to gris.

    One of the latter is “The Shiny Car in the Night” by Nick Mamatas, about a Northport mafia family whose lives have been colored by Jack Kerouac, who used to play pool in Gunther’s Tap Room there. The tension builds and nudges the story inexorably toward the inevitable noir conclusion but then, just as you grit your teeth for the concluding blow, it whips around and surprises you. Just what a short story should be.

    I mention this piece first because you might want to save it for last, to clear the palate after a pretty dark story menu — a little lemon sorbet after a kilo of squid ink risotto, say.

    Take Jules Feiffer’s six-page cartoon, “Boob Noir.” Because Mr. Feiffer’s work and voice are so instantly recognizable, you stride unwarily into the cartoon frames, only to be brought up short by their very different tone, the unsettling feeling that something is not quite right. . . . And it’s not.

    There’s a moving story by Dr. Qanta Ahmed, who is an associate professor of medicine at the State University at Stony Brook, about an abused Pakistani girl in an arranged marriage. Related by the doctor who has treated her, a Muslim woman from a similar background who has found a very different path in life, it is full of fresh and vivid detail about hospitals and the hidden world of Muslims in America.

    Another from an insider’s point of view is “Jabo’s” by Amani Scipio, about life along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike in the 1970s, a tiny enclave that might have been on the moon for all the interaction it had with the rest of the South Fork. That this convincing and harrowing tale comes to a rather inconclusive end leaves one wondering just how much of it was fiction.

    “Long Island Noir” is part of a series that includes “Orange County Noir” and “Istanbul Noir” and 50 other similar titles — and with another 10 titles in the works there seems to be no end in sight. This one has police harassment in Southampton, a petty criminal in Nesconset with a master plan, a serial loser in Wantagh who is going to put his life right with just one last desperate gamble, and Jane Ciabattari showing us that it really helps to be technically brilliant when planning revenge-by-Internet on a former partner.

    In most short-story collections, there’s often a dog or two, and “Long Island Noir” is no exception (there’s one that, since we’re all in the noirish mode, makes you want to put the author’s feet in a bucket of cement and dump it off the Port Jefferson ferry), but over all the quality is high and the stories entertaining.

    Above all, speaking as one who now lives very far away from Long Island, what I enjoyed was the unconscious familiarity of the authors with their particular little pizza slice of the Island: Steven Wishnia’s Nicholls Road strip mall housing a “deli, Chinese takeout, paint store, RE/MAX real-estate office, a vacant Pilates gym, and the Dos Grandes Varones bar” where without a car you are trapped, Charles Salzberg’s seedy Long Beach boardwalk hotels and faux-Mediterranean houses originally built for “white Anglo-Saxon Protestants” only, and of course the striving, greedy, neurotic Hamptons themselves.

    As Kaylie Jones puts it in her introduction, “The American dream of suburban bliss has never died, only grown more desperate, more materialistic, and less romantic as it has shoved its way further east, until now there is literally nowhere left to go.”

    Kaylie Jones, who lived in Saga­ponack for many years, teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton.

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

   “The Man Who Wanted to Buy a Heart”

Leonard S. Bernstein

University of New Orleans Press, $18.95

    “The Man Who Wanted to Buy a Heart” is a new book of short fiction by Leonard S. Bernstein, who will be familiar to some readers of The Star, as his story “The Guided Tour of 7th Avenue” was previously published in these pages. The story benefits from the company of its companions: Mr. Bernstein’s collection is a cozy group of pieces that belong together. Here’s a suggestion: Read the collection in one or two sittings. It’s fun to do it that way, to let Mr. Bernstein’s voice and perspective claim an evening or two.

    That voice is full of experience and without artifice; it is knowing rather than sophisticated, considered if not highly polished. His perspective is marked by a strong sense of ethics and a wry sense of humor charmingly given to exaggeration. Throughout, he observes the push and pull between the seriousness and the drollness of life.

    Setting plays a large role in the collection, with a number of the stories taking place in New York City’s garment district, in an era at once bygone and timeless. Here is a passage from “The Guided Tour of 7th Avenue,” the stage-setting first story:

    I have agreed to take you to the garment center, and we begin at 7th Avenue and 38th street where the cutters are milling around at lunchtime. I approach one of the cutters who has been here a few hundred years and say, “How’s business, Benny?”

    “Terrible,” he answers. “Never in my life have I seen it as bad as this.”

    That means business is O.K.

    Also included in the book are several stories set in an unspecified past — olden times, or a removed, more intuitive era. These feel like old stories belonging to an oral tradition, and though you’ve never heard them before, something in you welcomes them home again.

    A standout among these fable-like stories is the title piece, “The Man Who Wanted to Buy a Heart,” which begins thus: “When Reuben wanted to buy a heart he went downtown to see Markowitz, who dealt in all commodities.” The story won’t remind you creepily of organ trafficking — it will remind you that people want what they want. Here is clever and gentle commentary on human nature, a tale both charming and wise.

    Other stories take place among modern-day, yet not quite exactly contemporary, men. There are men in business, men in competition, men who have been seized by unusual ideas and compulsions — upon which they act — and other men, naturally, who have bees in their bonnets about the actions of their fellow men.

    In these pieces, the action takes place in a time a little before now — things hit the papers instead of going viral on the Net — but the action is also somewhat suspended from the timeline. The characters in these stories are buffered, held apart by the feeling — created by a sense of timelessness that develops throughout the collection — that they might just as easily find themselves as figures in an old yarn.

    A highlight among these stories is “The Unusual Burial of George Mc­Nabe,” in which a man takes a notion about where he wants to rest in peace — under the elm in his front yard — much to the dismay of his neighbors. Also a favorite is “Nobody Beats Mason,” which takes place at a tennis club in East Hampton and is narrated by a man struggling to maintain his sense of himself and his ethical sense while coexisting with other men. And playing tennis. And contemplating the unwritten rules:

    A lot of thought goes into the after-tennis conversation. For instance, let’s say you got badly beaten by a player who shouldn’t beat you at all. You don’t go around asking everyone else how they did. The result of asking is that you get asked.

    . . . On the other hand, if you beat someone who you have no business beating, you naturally squeeze into a crowded spot and stir up an absolute whirlwind of tennis talk.

    Each piece takes stock of human nature in some small way. Admittedly, some stories are more successful than others, but there’s strength in numbers here: The stories belong in a collection, and they work together toward developing Mr. Bernstein’s voice. You’ll find an honest point of view. You’ll find a prevailing sense of heart.

    Leonard S. Bernstein lives in Woodbury and Amagansett.

    Evan Harris, the author of “The Quit,” lives in East Hampton with her husband and two sons.

College Writing Awards

    College students. Might there be any reading this page? Well, you family relation out there, here’s something of interest to pass on: Suffolk Community College is sponsoring creative writing awards for college writers. They come with prize money and online publication for the winners in four categories: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and one-act play.

    The original, previously unpublished work must be submitted with no name on it. Poets have been asked to submit three poems, one per page, each with a title. For fiction writers, it’s one story up to 10 pages, double-spaced. A complete piece is preferred over an excerpt. The same length requirement applies to creative nonfiction, which includes memoir, “lyric essay,” and literary journalism. (That piece written for English class? The one where you argue counterintuitively that Wordsworth came not to praise nature but to wage war on it? Forget it. No academic prose will be accepted.) And last, plays can be up to 20 pages in a standard format.

    Students can submit work in more than one genre. The reading fee is $5, which is waived for Suffolk Community College students. All submissions must go through the following doozy of an online address: thescccreativewritingfestival.submishmash.com/submit.

    There’s time, as the deadline is Feb. 15 of next year. But if the last-minute all-nighter works for you, go for it.

Kids’ Lit Workshops

    Interested in writing for children? Space remains in the first session of children’s literature workshops from July 11 to 15 at Stony Brook Southampton’s coming conference, called Summer Arts Southampton.

    Emma Walton Hamilton is directing the workshops. Leading the young-adult novel session will be Cynthia Leitich Smith and Greg Leitich Smith. Peter H. Reynolds, an author and illustrator, will lead a picture book workshop, and the middle-grade novel session will be led by Kate McMullan, a Horn Book Award-winning writer who lives in Sag Harbor.

    The workshops are open to new, established, and aspiring writers, the college said in a release, and involve lectures, group discussions, and more. Applications and further details can be found online at southamptonarts.org.

   Should you pick up the new Southampton Review expecting familiar contributors, you’d be right and wrong. First of all, who’s going to complain about opening a journal to more poems, four of them, by Billy Collins? That star of versification known for a peerless sense of humor is here contemplative — digging up an old toy truck in his backyard and thinking of the past, or pondering the oddity of the writing life.

    Jules Feiffer, another returnee associated with Stony Brook Southampton, the journal’s publisher, not only changes up his distinctive cartooning with a portfolio of sketched and watercolored superheroes, in doing so he brings a welcome reminder of his tutelage under the late Will Eisner, the creator of the revolutionary strip “The Spirit,” who with his 1978 “A Contract With God” more or less invented the so-called graphic novel. Mr. Feiffer’s take is characteristically witty — a hangdog costumed hero, for instance, eyes downcast: “Superhero Without Motivation.”

    Also in the spring edition, well reproduced across its glossy pages, is a series of colorful images, mostly of an oarsman plying the waters, from “What Shores, What Seas,” a book by Barry McCallion, an East Hampton artist.

    Four watercolors by Walter Bernard, “waterscapes” all, from a pond near Northwest Creek to the Bridgehampton surf, are eye-catching, appearing suited to wall-mounted immensity. A closer look reveals they average only about 7 by 11 inches, however, leading to helpless speculation that if Mr. Bernard had simply substituted feet for inches he’d be sitting atop a mound of coin worthy of Scrooge McDuck.

    There is, of course, much more: an eight-and-a-half-page poem by Kenneth Koch and an interview with his second wife, Karen Culler Koch, cartoons by Gahan Wilson and Michael Maslin, a memoir by Jennifer Brooke, a documentary filmmaker who lives in Sag Harbor, on her experiences with a sperm donor, and fiction by Rachel Pastan, the author of the novels “This Side of Married” and “Lady of the Snakes.”

   Amazon, beloved for its Kindle and its convenience. Amazon, loathed for its . . . Kindle and its convenience. With the online giant now moving into publishing in its own right and in a major way, imprints and all, the time is right to hear from a company mover and shaker, namely Larry Kirshbaum, newly appointed to lead Amazon Publishing in New York. He will be interviewed by Daniel Menaker, formerly a fiction editor at The New Yorker, on Wednesday at Stony Brook Southampton. Part of the M.F.A. program’s Writers Speak series, the free talk starts at 7 p.m. in Chancellors Hall’s Radio Lounge.

    Mr. Kirshbaum, a longtime industry insider, has been a literary agent and the head of the Time Warner Book Group. His interlocutor, Mr. Menaker, is the author, aptly, of “A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation.” A past editor in chief of Random House, he teaches at the college.

   “Space Chronicles”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

W.W. Norton, $26.95

   By an alphabetic coincidence, I was positioned next to Neil deGrasse Tyson during a summertime Authors Night at the East Hampton Library. What struck me over the course of the evening was the number of children who approached him to ask questions about astronomy — and the way he responded to them, with patience and excitement, even getting down on the floor at times to put himself at their eye level. The kids looked rapt, as though they had found a private portal to the wider universe, which in fact they had.

    Mr. Tyson is a tall man with a giant dream. As he recounts in his latest book, “Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier,” he was born the same week as NASA, in October 1958, and developed an early passion for the heavens from the roof of his family home in the Bronx. Today, as an astrophysicist, author, lecturer, director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, radio host, and frequent guest on television talk shows, Mr. Tyson takes every opportunity to revive our collective enthusiasm for space exploration. He knows all too well that it’s flagging.

    “Would a NASA reality show ‘Lunar Shore’ be more popular than ‘Jersey Shore’?” he asks in one of the “Space Tweets” peppering this volume of collected essays and speeches. “Civilization’s future depends on that answer.”

    I approached “Space Chronicles” expecting to find the material all too familiar, since I had read Mr. Tyson’s “Universe” columns as they appeared over the years in Natural History magazine. Instead I felt fired up anew by his vision of the possible. Mr. Tyson, wearing the mantle of the late Carl Sagan, mourns the geopolitical obstacles to robust funding of space ventures.

    “Raise the cost of a project above $20 billion to $30 billion,” he remarked in an interview reprised in “Space Chronicles,” “and if there’s not a weapon at the other end of the experiment, or you won’t see the face of God, or oil wells aren’t to be found, it risks not getting funded.”

    NASA’s budget, Mr. Tyson points out more than once in these pages, is comparatively small — one-half of 1 cent per dollar — yet is thought large because of the flamboyant nature of the agency’s successes.

    “You know all the people out there who ask why we’re spending so much money on NASA?” Mr. Tyson asked the guests at a Space Technology Hall of Fame dinner. “Every time I personally hear someone say that, I ask them, ‘How much do you think NASA’s getting? What fraction of your tax dollar do you think goes to NASA?’ ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘ten cents, twenty cents.’ Sometimes they even say thirty or forty cents. And when I tell them it’s not even a dime, not even a nickel, not even a penny, they say, ‘I didn’t know that. I guess that’s okay.’ When I tell them their half penny funded the beautiful images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the space shuttles, the International Space Station, all the scientific data from the inner and outer solar system and the research on the asteroid headed our way, they change their tune. . . . Occasionally, people muse that some or all of NASA’s budget should go to heal the sick, feed the homeless, train the teachers, or engage whatever social programs beckon. Of course, we already spend money on all these things, and on countless other needs. It’s this entire portfolio of spending that defines a nation’s identity. I, for one, want to live in a nation that values dreaming as a dimension of that spending.”

    Mr. Tyson’s uncontainable dreams bubble up often in “Space Chronicles,” though the text is more practical than starry-eyed, with the wit to dismiss failed rocket missions as “projectile dysfunction.” The book divides into three parts, explicating the “Why,” the “How,” and the “Why Not” of sustaining an American presence in space. There is much to enjoy here, and nothing too arcane for a non-space cadet to follow. The only section that falls short, in my estimation, is the poem Mr. Tyson composed, “Ode to Challenger, 1986.” But then, at least it’s short.

    As a scientist, Mr. Tyson might be content to send only robot envoys to other worlds. “You don’t have to feed them, they don’t need life support, and they won’t get upset if you don’t bring them home.” Such robots are out there now, “monitoring the sun, orbiting Mars, intercepting a comet’s tail, orbiting an asteroid, orbiting Saturn, and heading to Jupiter and Pluto.” They do an exemplary job. Nevertheless, Mr. Tyson considers astronauts irreplaceable. Human explorers “notice the unexpected, react to unforeseen circumstances, and solve problems in ways that robots cannot.” What’s more, they serve as heroes to inspire an interest in science among the young. There’s plenty of room in space for robots and humans to collaborate.

    Mr. Tyson once complained to a gathering at the National Space Club (another speech revisited in “Space Chronicles”) that he could not motivate a group of eighth graders to excel in the so-called STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — without a sufficient goal. “I don’t want to have to say to them, ‘Become an aerospace engineer so that you can build an airplane that’s 20 percent more fuel efficient than the ones your parents flew on.’ That won’t get them excited. What I need to say is, ‘Become an aerospace engineer so that you can design the airfoil that will be the first piloted craft in the rarefied atmosphere of Mars.’ ‘Become a biologist because we need people to look for life, not only on Mars but on Europa and elsewhere in the galaxy.’ ‘Become a chemist because we want to understand more about the elements on the Moon and the molecules in space.’ You put that vision out there, and my job becomes easy, because I just have to point them to it and the ambition rises up within them.”

    For the “space curmudgeons,” on the other hand, Mr. Tyson has engineered a fit punishment: “Sneak into the home of a NASA skeptic in the dead of night and remove all the technologies from the home and environs that were directly or indirectly influenced by space innovations: microelectronics, GPS, scratch-resistant lenses, cordless power tools, memory-foam mattresses and head cushions, ear thermometers, household water filters, shoe insoles, long-distance telecommunication devices, adjustable smoke detectors, and safety grooving of pavement, to name a few. While you’re at it, make sure to reverse the person’s LASIK surgery. Upon waking, the skeptic embarks on a newly barren existence in a state of untenable technological poverty, with bad eyesight to boot, while getting rained on without an umbrella because of not knowing the satellite-informed weather forecast for that day.”

    Appendix A of “Space Chronicles” presents the 1958 Act that established NASA. Tacked on there, it had the look of end-matter fill, till I realized I had never read it. According to Section 102 (b), “The Congress declares that the general welfare and security of the United States require that adequate provision be made for aeronautical and space activities.” In other words, space exploration isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law.

    Neil deGrasse Tyson has a house in East Hampton.

    Dava Sobel is the author, most recently, of “A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos.” She lives in Springs.

“Eminent Outlaws”

Christopher Bram

Twelve, $27.99

  What would American literature look like without contributions from gay writers? Think of a canon without “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “In Cold Blood,” “Angels in America,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” or the essays of Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. It isn’t pretty to think so (and these are just the men). While many of these works will live on indefinitely, what is often overlooked is the indifference, resistance, or often outright hostility these writers endured in both their private and professional lives. It is this struggle, and these writers’ role in carving out what would eventually become a gay American “mainstream,” that Christopher Bram explores in his new book, “Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America.”

    Mr. Bram begins his tale in the late 1940s, in (where else?) Times Square, where a young Gore Vidal is working as a part-time book editor by day and picking up male hustlers by night. He also finds time to write a novel, “The City and the Pillar,” which may be the first direct account of male homosexuality in a widely published American novel. Vidal was a sergeant in the Navy, too, a fact that figures widely in Mr. Bram’s thesis. It was the mass mobilization of the war itself, he posits, that threw together Americans from different parts of the country and “which first made the idea of homosexuality more amenable to American culture. Men who liked men and women who liked women found they were far from alone.” While gay American writers had previously kept their mouths shut about their sexuality, at least in their fiction — Henry James, Hart Crane, Thornton Wilder — writers now had a new freedom to speak more directly about their inclinations.

    Things hardly changed overnight, however. Along with Vidal’s novel, Truman Capote would publish “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” a book that made more gentle allusion to homosexuality, but which garnered the same tepid reviews, or worse: “disgusting,” “sterile,” and “gauche” for Vidal; Capote, meanwhile, “has talent, but it is not a promising talent; it is a ruined one.” Tennessee Williams succumbs to the pressure to tone down the homosexuality of his hero Brick in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” with so many different drafts, Mr. Bram speculates that the famous exclamations of “mendacity!” are partially Williams chafing himself over his own artistic integrity.

    By the time Allen Ginsberg publishes his epic poem “Howl” the knives are out, and an obscenity trial follows. The liberality of the postwar years has evaporated and many gay writers return to the closet — or is it just their characters? As his book moves through the early 1960s, Mr. Bram does a terrific job of covering the sometimes ugly accusations that the “straight” work of gay writers was in fact simply a foxhole for gay themes; it was widely argued, for example, that the combative husband and wife of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” were really just a bickering gay couple. Why so many straight couples saw themselves so completely in Martha and George — or if it mattered whether the author, Edward Albee, drew them from gay characters or not — was never considered.

    As we move into the ’70s and early ’80s, though, Mr. Bram’s book loses steam — always in direct proportion to the gradual acceptance of gay culture. In fact, I’m not sure that Mr. Bram ever satisfactorily proves his thesis, that it was gay writers who made the culture more accepting of homosexuals (rather than the changing culture making these artists’ success possible). Is there a natural line connecting, say, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams to “Will and Grace,” the sitcom so often cited as the touchstone of a gay infiltration of mainstream America? That seems a tenuous connection at best.

    And I’m not sure that, however besieged they were or felt to be, most of the writers in this collection can fall under the moniker of “outlaw.” The majority of writers explored here were highly successful establishment icons whose works flourished. Many became fixtures on the TV talk show circuit, and a handful, at least, even grew rich. Jean Genet was an outlaw; as for Tennessee Williams, I believe the term “genius” will do.

    But so what if Mr. Bram’s book doesn’t­ quite live up to the grandness of its title; it is still a sizable accomplishment — a history of gay men’s contribution to American literature in the second half of the 20th century. If these writers didn’t single-handedly create an American acceptance of homosexuality, they certainly played their part. I only wish the Rick Santorums of this world would read Mr. Bram’s book, or better yet, some of the actual works of these great authors.

    But then some people only need one book.

    Christopher Bram’s novels include “Father of Frankenstein,” which was made into the movie “Gods and Monsters.” Of the subjects of “Eminent Outlaws,” Edward Albee lives in Montauk and Truman Capote lived in Saga­ponack.

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

Right around the corner from our boys’ grade school,

they’d go there — first with us and then, older enough,

with their friends — for after-school treats, Everett’s

bushy mustache always smiling behind the counter.

Thirty-three years is a long time to know someone,

let alone a grocery store, and one could claim that

three generations of kids passed through his doors.

When Augie, our 12-year-old, told me about the sign

on the door he looked away, maybe from the idea itself —

he already knows things change and sometimes disappear.

He knows more than he can put into words. A good

or bad day at school always meant a Snickers bar

or frozen Eskimo Pie, though finding a parking spot,

especially in summer, meant frustration, with all

the workers wanting one of his deviled egg sandwiches

(made only on Wednesdays). The middle school across

the street, the high school not far away, the railroad

station (where men line up looking for work), Bucket’s

certainly has seen its share of good and bad times (mostly

bad now), even when it was only a place to drive past

on one’s way somewhere grander. Places come and go

so it’s hard to say exactly why this one’s so special,

maybe because it’s impossible to imagine a town like

East Hampton, where so much happens that doesn’t stay

or belong here, not having one place unlike any other.

Or maybe it’s because of the children who grow up so fast

and then also leave. Well, Bucket’s, thanks and goodbye.

(Let’s just pray it won’t be replaced by another clothing store!)

    Philip Schultz's most recent collections of poems are "The God of Loneliness" and "Failure," which won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2008. He lives in East Hampton.

 “The Tender Hour

of Twilight”

Richard Seaver

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $35 

   No review can do justice to this incredibly rich memoir of publishing’s golden age — Paris in the ’50s and New York in the ’60s. At best what follows is just a sketch. You will really have to read Richard Seaver’s masterpiece for yourself. Buy “The Tender Hour of Twilight” at an independent bookstore, Canio’s or BookHampton — it is a celebration of the heyday of such stores long before the metastasis of the e-book, chains, and Amazon.com.

    Imagine! In the ’50s and ’60s publishing was fun! Authors and editors knew each other, celebrated, fought, and cried together. Bottom-line corporate hacks were unknown. Small presses and tiny bookstores struggled to survive and did the truly valuable work of discovering new literary talent.

    And editors like Seaver were at the center of it all. This vivid recollection — wonderfully edited by Seaver’s widow, Jeannette (he died in 2009), immerses the reader in that era.

    Seaver journeyed to Paris after graduation from the University of North Carolina and a brief stint as a teacher and wrestling coach at Connecticut’s Pomfret School. He won an American Field Service Fellowship and headed off to France expecting to find a whiff of the long-gone Hemingway and Fitzgerald magic. A decade later, I too set off seeking the same whiff. Seaver and I stayed at the same Left Bank hotel, 21 Rue Jacob, he for 30 cents a night, but by the time I arrived such a room cost $1.40 a night. I briefly planned to start a magazine titled Patterns but thankfully the notion expired.

    Like many an expat, Seaver got by teaching English to the French, at Berlitz, and also to Air France stewardesses at Orly Airport. To get to Orly he biked from Paris on his Peugeot (Big Blue) — a three-hour round trip.

    Seaver was there at the start of a little English language journal called Merlin, which kept the faith for a few years after an initial funding from a founding editor’s dad in, of all places, Limerick, Me. Early on Seaver and Merlin championed an unknown named Samuel Beckett: “the most exciting writer I have read since I’ve come to Paris . . . he had just turned forty-five . . . for God’s sake, and nobody was reading him!”

    Seaver set out to rectify that oblivion at Merlin and later in New York at Barney Rosset’s Grove Press. He devoured everything that Beckett wrote and attended the first performance (in French) of “Waiting for Godot” at a nearly empty Left Bank theater. The reviews were not enthusiastic.

    Beckett was reclusive and Seaver labored long to meet him. He describes their first encounter:

    We’d all but given up hope of ever hearing from Beckett when, one dark and stormy early evening in late November . . . a knock came at the door. The noise of the rain on the glass roof up above was so deafening we barely heard the knock. When finally I answered, there, outlined in the light, was a tall gaunt figure in a raincoat, water streaming down from the brim of the nondescript hat jammed onto the top of his head. From inside the folds of his raincoat he fished a package, not even wrapped against the downpour: a manuscript bound in a black imitation-leather binder.

    “You asked me for this,” he said, thrusting the package into my hand. “Here it is.”

    It was the manuscript for his novel “Watt.” Beckett disappeared into the night.

    Other Paris notables of the era were not so hard to meet. Brendan Behan, a stranger to Seaver, arrived at Seaver’s room one night thusly:

    “SEAVER! I’m looking for RICHARD SEAVER. HIMSELF! I know you’re in there, SO OPEN UP!”

    . . . “WHO IS IT?” I shouted, trying hard to match the door-side decibels.

    “BRENDAN,” the voice said. “BRENDAN BEHAN’S THE NAME. SO OPEN THE FUCK UP! WE NEED TO TALK.”

    And so Brendan Behan, boozing all the while, moved right in.

    Merlin and George Plimpton’s Paris Review were rivals of sorts in the Paris of the 1950s. Also present was the ambitious publisher of Olympia Press erotica, Maurice Girodias, who briefly hooked up with Merlin to distribute Merlin books. But Seaver’s Parisian odyssey was about to end. The Navy called him up in his reserve status and he and his new French wife, Jeannette, headed to the Boston Naval Base to await future orders.

    Before he left, Seaver received a letter from a New Yorker, Barney Rosset, who had read his piece on Beckett in Merlin number 2 and wanted to meet him in Paris. Rosset had just bought the failing Grove Press for $3,000 and was hunting for authors.

    “Barney was a slight, intense, wired-up young man whom I judged to be in his early thirties, although his receding hairline made him look older,” Seaver writes of their first meeting. “He was wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, and when he laughed — which he did often, though nervously, as if he weren’t quite sure a laugh was appropriate to the remark — he looked strangely equine, baring both gums.”

    Their association would last over a decade and change the literature of the century. In New York, Seaver found Grove Press to be “a beehive of scuffle and scurry.” Grove was about to publish the first unexpurgated “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence, a sure lightning rod for censorship — along with 60-plus other titles by Frank O’Hara, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Rechy, and all of Samuel Beckett. The censoring lawsuits against “Chatterley” and other titles were endless and threatened to bankrupt Grove, but Seaver and Rosset soldiered on and forever altered what was permissible to publish. (Rosset died last week.)

    The high point of the ’60s included two amazing eyewitness accounts. At the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention the Seavers escorted the French writer Jean Genet through what amounted to a police riot wonderfully recalled by Seaver. Two years later, in April 1970, Grove’s offices were invaded by a women’s liberation group demanding union representation. They took over Rosset’s office and threatened to burn years of invaluable correspondence. Again Seaver was the center of the action, trying to calm red-hot passions.

    Soon thereafter the house Barney built suffered a startling financial collapse. Seaver started his own imprint at Viking and later was publisher of Holt, Rinehart, and Winston before founding Arcade Publishing in 1989, which he and Jeannette ran until his death. Arcade published over 500 books by authors from 30 countries and was a beacon as one of the last independent literary houses.

    For me at Pushcart he is no less than a hero. What he did in Paris and at Grove is an inspiration for thousands of writers and editors in today’s small-press movement. We insist, as Seaver did, that literature should never be just about money. It comes from the heart, and publishing is a matter of guts and daring and not the bottom line.

    If there is any sadness to be noted in this review let it go on record that Seaver was a beautiful writer. I only wish he had written more and not devoted 100 percent of his life to other authors.

    Richard Seaver had a house in Southampton.

    Bill Henderson publishes the Pushcart Press in Springs. His latest book is a memoir, “All My Dogs: A Life.”