Books

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.

The Hampton Library's Fridays at Five summertime series of author appearances returns, but it'll be online in these pandemic times.
 

The history of Freemasonry on Long Island runs deep, dating back to George Washington, and is remarkably fire-plagued, particularly in Sag Harbor.

Betsey Johnson had a light touch as a designer. Traveling the world in search of ideas and fabrics, she brought a joy and silliness and youthfulness to fashion.

An ambitious debut novel of cynical aid workers and expats follows a young Congolese on a Homeric journey north to Morocco and, he hopes, Europe.

To Ted Rall, America's toxic political system is exemplified by the Democratic National Committee's thwarting of Bernie Sanders's candidacy in 2016. "Donald Trump becomes president because the DNC has its thumb on the scale for Hillary," he writes in his new graphic journal, a plea for a progressive agenda.

A richly illustrated, reference-quality survey that places our fish-shaped, almost 120-mile-long island squarely where it belongs in maritime history.

This seductive guidebook from the National Trust for Historic Preservation takes in 44 domiciles and workplaces of great American artists, from Thomas Moran and Jackson Pollock locally to Winslow Homer in Maine and Donald Judd in Texas.

Barry Sonnenfeld’s view of his own history is a mordant one: “Regret the past. Fear the present. Dread the future” are the words he says he lives by, despite having fashioned a very nice life and career out of the shambles of his youth.     

Why was Maj. Benjamin M. Koehler, a distinguished veteran of the Spanish-American War and a West Point graduate, tried in a military tribunal for homoerotic acts?

“Texas Flood,” a colorful biography of the complicated and obsessed Stevie Ray Vaughan, brings together the recollections of friends, bandmates, managers, fellow guitar heroes, and relatives like his older brother, the guitarist Jimmie Vaughan.

Carl Safina is among those few standing in the way of the mass extinctions we’re causing. He beseeches us poetically and tirelessly to hear what nature is saying, and the way he shares his deep love of life on Earth can at times make reading his most recent book, “Becoming Wild,” rather difficult.

There are precious few introductions to the subject of sculpture, so Eric Gibson of The Wall Street Journal addressed that void with this collection of 36 clear and learned essays.

After more than 50 years of teaching, researching, lecturing, and publishing, John A. Strong has written the book we have all been waiting for, a chronicle of the clash of Indian and English cultures and whaling interests on Long Island in the years following settlement.

“Front Pages, Front Lines” is a compendium of essays about the relationship between journalism and the women’s suffrage movement, but also a corrective of that reporting and what really happened.

The culture critic and iconoclast Katie Roiphe is specific about a particular preoccupation: “women strong in public, weak in private.”

From one poet to another: In his new memoir, Mark Doty explores the lasting effect Walt Whitman has had on his life and work, wondering at this “extraordinary flowering that seemed to appear out of nowhere.”

Class warfare in the Hamptons gets personal, and dark, in Jason Allen’s debut novel, “The East End,” now out in convenient paperback for your reading pleasure.

Paul Lisicky’s new memoir, “Later,” is at once a beautifully crafted description of the rhythms of life in a resort community and a story of surviving the height of the AIDS epidemic.