Books

Organized chronologically over the past five decades, Jerry Seinfeld’s “Is This Anything?” is both a history of American habits and preoccupations and also an autobiographical record of the thoughts of an analytically minded American male as he progressed from his 20s to his 60s.

New from local authors: Former ad man Lyle Greenfield brings art world psychological suspense, 1980s-style, and Kay Tobler Liss takes on Montauk in the off-season, where a Native American woman fends off a land grab.

“Inside Story” is utterly saturated with death. Paradoxically, it is also one of the liveliest and most entertaining books from Martin Amis since his 2000 memoir, “Experience.”

The new Pushcart anthology of the best of the small presses is heavy on sincerity, light on cynicism; heavy on depth of feeling, light on cheap shots.

“One Last Lunch,” Erica Heller’s colorful compendium of essays, gives a number of writers the chance to share a repast with their deceased friends, lovers, colleagues, occasional alter egos, and notably fathers, from Saul Bellow to John Cheever to, of course, Joseph Heller.

In “On Account of Race,” Lawrence Goldstone traces Supreme Court decisions regarding voting rights from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the present. It is a book that challenges your faith in the independence and fairness of the high court.

Grace Schulman casts her steady eye on mortality in her new collection of poems, “The Marble Bed.” Or, more accurately, she casts her eye on the things around her and they describe mortality back to her. 

Donald Trump is by far the most egregious liar ever to reside in the White House, but he is hardly the first, writes Eric Alterman in “Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie — and Why Trump Is Worse,” a kind of American history textbook for our unsettled times.

Roger Rosenblatt’s “Cold Moon” is like an extended prose poem, with runs of free associations and streams of consciousness tackling major themes of life, death, and grief.

On the new books front: Suzanne McNear’s “Swimming Lessons and Other Stories” and Janet Lee Berg’s “Restitution,” a follow-up to “Rembrandt's Shadow,” historical fiction about one family’s art looted by the Nazis.

The M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton will welcome the poet Major Jackson for an online reading and talk on Oct. 28 at 7 p.m.

The character-driven second book by the singer-songwriter turned novelist Suzzy Roche is set in a Catholic enclave in Pennsylvania in 1961. It is a social satire with sympathy, realism with softened edges.

Alastair Gordon talks up the Barnes Coy architecture firm and interviews a principal, and Grace Schulman headlines a celebration of Turtle Point Press via Canio’s Books.

Bill Henderson’s “The Family Bible” is a collection of plainspoken, candid poems centering on his struggle with the fundamentalist, literalist religion of his childhood and youth, with its contradictions of a loving and angry God and stories of kindness and violence.

Chris Whipple’s “The Spymasters” fleshes out the triumphs, tragedies, and turf wars of national intelligence with a trove of new details and insights from an astounding cast of characters.

In “For Now,” a book-length essay in Yale’s “Why I Write” series, Eileen Myles enacts the very strategies identified as essential to the author’s poetics. The essay chronicles its own construction, so that we learn not only why Myles writes, but also how this particular piece of writing came to be. 

Betsy Carter’s new novel is an intergenerational tale of family pleasures and tensions in a small town. Sweet and warm, it’s nice to be in her world the way it’s nice to look through a bakery’s glass case.

“Paris Never Leaves You,” an extraordinary new novel by Ellen Feldman of East Hampton, cuts between Paris in 1944 during the late stages of the Nazi occupation and the New York City publishing world of 1954. 

The course of true love never did run smooth: Book lovers with devoted book clubs are doing everything in their power, even mastering new technology, to keep up with meetings in the age of coronavirus. What Zoom lacks in dimension, dimensional conversation makes up for.

In Dirk Wittenborn’s new thriller, “The Stone Girl,” the females are strong and resourceful. The males, well, they’re strong and resourceful, too, it’s just that a large proportion of them are forces for evil.

Blake Gopnik's 900-plus-page doorstop of a biography of Andy Warhol is both a daunting undertaking and a hard-to-put-down page-turner, fully capturing its subject in almost microscopic detail.

In “Burning Down the House,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor, makes a detailed and compelling case that it was the G.O.P. firebrand Newt Gingrich whose approach to politics on the congressional level most prefigured and paved the way for Donald Trump’s.

Sarah Maslin Nir's "Horse Crazy" is not exclusively about horses at all, but a thoughtful memoir that blends rich reportage with intimate stories of combating loneliness and navigating grief. 

A pup who won’t listen, a shark who wants a friend, and a wolf who just needs to chill. It’s your friendly neighborhood picture book roundup.

One man’s tip of the cap to some comforting voices in the time of Covid.

The Whitney Museum may have had to cancel what would have been a major show of paintings by Agnes Pelton, who fashioned a Hayground windmill into a studio, but she gets her day in the form of Mari Coates's historical novel “The Pelton Papers.”

Jill Bialosky and Kathy Engel will read and discuss new work on Aug. 13 in Guild Hall's backyard theater.

The late John Giorno’s memoir of “poetry, sex, art, death, and enlightenment” shows him as a man very much in the middle of the New York art scene’s 1960s and ’70s heyday.

This year’s Authors Night fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library goes virtual from Aug. 6 to 9 with talks by the likes of Philip Rucker, Mike Birbiglia, and Neal Gabler.

Kathy Engel’s new poetry collection, “The Lost Brother Alphabet,” concerns itself with mortality, with the mystery of how we endure and what we become after those we love die.