“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.

  “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.

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.

“A Complicated

Marriage”

Janice Van Horne

Counterpoint, $26

   Clement Greenberg was one of the most significant — some would also say the most acerbic, bombastic, and pugilistic — art critics of the 20th century. He presided over the development of modernist art for some 40 years, championing American abstraction (he coined the term “Abstract Expressionism”), artistic taste and purity, formalism, and flatness in painting. He helped turn New York City into the capital of the art world, and he fueled America’s dominance in a global market.

   Throughout, he extolled the art of then-emerging artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Robert Motherwell. And yet, in the last 20 years of his life Greenberg published little. He lectured mostly outside New York. By the 1970s, after Pop Art and Minimalism rose to dominance, his star had waned. Rebuked by cultural insiders who rejected his pol­emics, five years before his death in 1994 Greenberg was called “the most hated man in the New York art world” by the art historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Frank. He may have also been the most misunderstood intellectual in the untidy world of art criticism.

   Perhaps he towered too high — became too cheeky, too immutable. Or maybe the art world simply regrouped. Greenberg was, without question, as arrogant and cocksure as he was brilliant. It is easy enough to find theoretical scholarship, biography, and ample gossip to expound on both the ascendance and the decline of this seminal figure in American art. But Janice (Jenny) Van Horne’s new memoir reveals a fresh perspective that sheds light on the interior life of Clement Greenberg, not only as the esteemed art critic but as a husband, lover, and off and on companion of nearly 40 years.

    “A Complicated Marriage: My Life With Clement Greenberg” is an introspective journey through marriage and divorce, love and loss, celebrity and disillusionment. The book opens juicily enough to the night the couple met at a post-opening party in Greenwich Village. There, an impertinent Greenberg slapped his ex-girlfriend, the artist Helen Frankenthaler, after an imbroglio of some degree with her date. Nonetheless, Ms. Van Horne, a Bennington graduate — 21 years old to his 46 — managed to make sure the famed critic got her telephone number before the evening came to a close. They were married two months later.

    Ms. Van Horne writes about her life with Clem in vivid, behind-the-scenes detail. In the beginning they lived in a world divided by 14th Street — the clubs and studios as well as their Bank Street apartment were all downtown; the pageantry was uptown. Ms. Van Horne, always the onlooker, never the looked-upon back then, recounts their early partnership with some amusement. They haunted dark clubs to see the likes of Lenny Bruce and frequented weeknight poetry readings featuring Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg. At the club Bon Soir on Eighth Street, one of their favorites was an awkward 18-year-old with an unforgettable voice, Barbra Streisand. And many a night, of course, was spent at the Cedar Tavern, the famed art world watering hole.

    While Ms. Van Horne’s prose sometimes drifts off into dreamy soliloquies, her attention to the details of personality and presence is inspired. An account of dinner at Lee Krasner’s uptown apartment, at which she suffered the misfortune of being seated across from Louise Nevelson, is priceless. Her bold characterization of the sculptor David Smith at his Bolton Landing studio is chilling, and memories of artists and artist couples such as Adolph Gottlieb, Annalee and Barnett Newman, and Pat and Clyfford Still are variously caustic, touching, or hilarious.

    As she was an eyewitness to American art history, few of Ms. Van Horne’s memories are more revealing or possess more historic veracity than her recollection of the friendship she and Clement shared with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. The couples spent innumerable weekends together, and although Jenny continued to feel like an outsider in Clem’s world, her accounts of history in the making are often incisive and canny.

    In 1956, she persuaded Greenberg to take a summer share in East Hampton. Clem came out on weekends until August, when both he and Jenny were full-time summer residents. They’d spend the day at the beach and then move on to dinner at the Elm Tree Inn or to Jackson and Lee’s house in Springs. The two men shared a deep bond and in spite of the verbal combat that often erupted between them, they were confidants. The level of discourse seemed relative to Jackson’s sobriety — Ms. Van Horne speaks of him “white-knuckling his coffee mug” until cocktail time — but there was plenty of imbibing to go around. In fact, at times it seemed the entire infrastructure of the New York art world was on one never-ending bender.

    Clement Greenberg’s promotion of Jackson Pollock is the stuff of legend, and it launched the artist into history as well as celebrity — maybe not the best contingency for a moody, self-critical alcoholic. Nonetheless, Pollock’s treatment of the canvas — replacing the subject in painting with painting itself — was the perfect muse for the ascent of Greenbergian theory.

    Greenberg advocated nonobjective form in art, arguing that as the visual experience moved away from content it advanced to a higher form. He had a formidable intellect — his ideology was intractable — and his thesis would become one of the most significant contributions to the formation of a postwar American aesthetic. But after all the swagger, deep down Greenberg was a passionate lover of art.

    Ms. Van Horne tells the story of the fateful weekend when Jackson Pollock and one of his companions, Edith Metz­ger, died in a brutal and highly avoidable car crash. With excruciating detail she outlines the events surrounding Pollock’s death. His failure to show at a summer concert prompted concern, and soon the call arrived — Jackson was dead, killed in a car crash on Springs-Fireplace Road. Ms. Van Horne’s recollections are crystal clear and, sad as it is, it is an irresistible read.

    Throughout her tale, Ms. Van Horne struggles to find the truth in her own world. Life with Clem seems to have been a messy business inflamed by infidelity, restlessness, bouts of depression, and booze. There was tenderness, too, and a loving, if imperfect, affinity. She wrestled her way toward liberation and a life that included motherhood, acting, and the theater, maturing into a successful playwright. To her credit, she makes no attempt to explain Greenberg outside of their personal lives — in fact, she talks often of how inexplicable the art world appeared to her, leaving the analysis to the Ph.D.s.

    Whether he was a megalomaniac, a genius, a frustrated painter and poet, or another guy avenging unsupportive parents, the story of Clement Greenberg is an intoxicating mixture of bravura, brilliance, and bombast. Janice Van Horne’s memoir sheds light on both the gospel and the man. Both intriguing subjects, to be sure.

    Janet Goleas is an artist, curator, and writer living in East Hampton. Her art blog is at blinnk.blogspot.com.

“Long Island Noir”

    Forget the sunshine and beaches. You don’t have to sit in traffic or schlep through a dispiriting strip mall to know of Long Island’s dark side. And now its depths are plumbed in a more literary way in an anthology, “Long Island Noir,” edited by Kaylie Jones and out this week from Akashic Books.

    Part of a series of dozens of such collections by that publisher, from the fresh take (“Indian Country Noir”) to the familiar (“Los Angeles Noir”), this edition doubles down on the geographical angle with a distinct setting for each story: Ms. Jones, who lived in Sagaponack for many years, on dirty dealings in a “Home Invasion” in Wainscott, for example, or Jane Ciabattari’s “Contents of House,” which takes place in her own Sag Harbor. There’s even a six-page graphical tale set in Southampton by Jules Feiffer.

    All three of the above named will read from the collection at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m., joined by other contributors — Sheila Kohler, Charles Salzberg, and JZ Holden.

Cappy Makes Good

    And speaking of that whaling village, a book about one of its better-known citizens, “Cappy: The Art and Life of C. Hjalmar Amundsen” by Terry Wallace of the Wallace Gallery in East Hampton, has won a 2012 Independent Publisher Regional Book Award, or Ippy. The awards highlight titles of notable quality and regional significance from across North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

    The book, published by M.T. Fine Arts and the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum, where there was a show of Amundsen’s paintings last year, tied for the top nonfiction spot in the Northeast with “Dear Friend Amelia: The Civil War Letters of Private John Tidd.” Amundsen died in 2001.

Goethe Medal

    Last week the writer Silvia Tennenbaum of Springs was awarded the German province of Hesse’s Goethe Medal for her work. She is the author of the novels “Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife” and “Yesterday’s Streets.”

    “Yesterday’s Streets” is a story of two Jewish families in Frankfurt in the first half of the 20th century. It was recently translated into German, and Ms. Tennenbaum is on a book tour in that country, where she was born. She immigrated to America as a child in the 1930s.

Of Consequence

    Two of the South Fork’s leading literary figures were tapped to speak yesterday in Manhattan at sold-out events. Robert A. Caro, who has a house in East Hampton, was scheduled for a conversation with Rachel Syme at the 92nd Street Y about his career and his newest book about Lyndon Johnson, “The Passage of Power,” just released by Knopf and hailed as a major event in American letters. Ms. Syme is a contributor to NPR and Time magazine.

    E.L. Doctorow of Sag Harbor was on a “Literary Voices” panel with Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis at the TimesCenter on West 41st Street.

“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.

   “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.

   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.

   Carl Safina will read from “The View From Lazy Point” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. for the Writers Speak series, sponsored by the M.F.A. program in writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton. The free event will take place in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

    Mr. Safina, a past MacArthur fellow, is president and co-founder of the Blue Ocean Institute in Cold Spring Harbor. His PBS series, “Saving the Ocean,” premiered last spring.

    A half-hour beforehand, there will be a discussion of this year’s Southampton Arts Summer, which used to be called the Southampton Writers Conference — an assortment of July workshops on theater, film, visual arts, and writing.

 “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.”