Book Markers 12.01.11

Lit Lunch in Sag

    Call it a Sag Harbor affair: Two authors and residents feted at a lunch held in Ted Conklin’s American Hotel, the linchpin establishment in large part responsible some 40 years ago for sparing the village its lot as a half-abandoned wreck fit for wharf rats.

    But we’re not here to talk about the past. On Sunday at noon, David Margolick, a Vanity Fair contributor, and Lou Ann Walker, a professor in Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program and the editor in chief of The Southampton Review, will speak as the silverware clinks at an event sponsored by the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library (another old village beauty at last getting gussied up). The cost is $50, and reservations are by phone with Chris Tice (she’s in the book) or by e-mail at [email protected].

    Mr. Margolick’s new book is “Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock,” the women being those immortalized in a photo from the Arkansas desegregation struggle showing seething hatred on one hand and a stoic carrying-on on the other.

    Ms. Walker is the author of “A Loss for Words,” a memoir about growing up with deaf parents, and “Hand, Heart, and Mind: The Story of the Education of America’s Deaf People.”

In Praise of Pushcart

    Long, lean, silver-haired, handsome, and not too depressive, Mark Strand, one of the country’s most eminent living poets, will take to the lectern or its approximation Sunday in Greenwich Village at a reading to celebrate the newly published “Best of the Small Presses” book from the happy anthologists at Pushcart. He’ll be joined, at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street, by a fellow poet, Susan Wheeler, and by a couple of fiction writers, Sigrid Nunez and Lydia Davis.

    And of course Bill Henderson of Springs, the editor and founder of the Pushcart Prize and Press, will be there to introduce and bask. (Speaking of books, his recent “All My Dogs” is an awfully good candidate for the coming season of gift-giving.) It’s a Writers Studio happening, too, so East Hampton’s Philip Schultz can’t be far behind. Admission is $10, with a whistle-wetting one-drink minimum. The gaiety gets going at

5 p.m.