Books

Colson Whitehead is too smart a writer to make "The Underground Railroad" simply another litany of white atrocities and triumphant freedom; he finds a new way to tell the story.

There may be a murder at the heart of Ray Merritt’s first novel, “Clamour of Crows,” but what’s really of interest is the author’s exploration of the culture of a Wall Street law firm.

Listening to the Bernie Sanders supporters, I heard Buffalo Springfield's refrain in my head, "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

A new poem by Kathy Engel

In the summer of 1979 I was introduced to Willie Morris at Bobby Van’s, then a wood-paneled chophouse that bore no resemblance to the chic local outpost it is today.

"Cousin Joseph" is the second installment of Jules Feiffer's graphic novel trilogy, a lively (and decidedly deadly) film noir homage that follows on the hard-boiled gumshoe heels of his 2014 New York Times best seller, "Kill My Mother."

Remember the Poetry Marathon? Held each summer at the Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett for years before it quietly left the scene? Well, it’s back.

The chicanery that prevailed in the unregulated art market of the late 20th century provoked no harsher critic than Robert Hughes. This outspoken art critic left his native Australia for Italy in 1964, landed in London in 1965, and settled in New York in 1970, the year of the painter Mark Rothko’s suicide.

Eowyn Ivey’s second novel, “To the Bright Edge of the World,” is at once an adventure tale, an epistolary love story, and a rendering of the bird life of the Great Northwest.

If you lived in New York City in the latter 1980s and early 1990s, as I did, chances are you had strong feelings regarding the writer Jay McInerney. Some of these feelings, maybe you can now admit, involved jealousy.

Ted Rall, a political cartoonist known for his intensely critical view of the American government, will return to the Amagansett Library to discuss his latest work, "Trump," on Aug. 4.

This time it’s in the estate section. Authors Night, that is, the fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library, which this year will be held at 4 Maidstone Lane in the village, not far from the Maidstone Club, calling together 100-plus writers for a mass book signing and sale, gab fest, and meet-and-greet starting at 5 p.m. on Aug. 13.

Local Book Notes: Crossword Talk and a Bustling BookHampton

Fifty-two years after they conquered America and 46 after they played their last song together, the Beatles remain a booming industry, not to mention a cultural force that forever changed popular music, fashion, and attitudes. Here's the latest biography . . .

“Black Hole Blues” is the engaging story of people who bet their reputations and their legacies on a science and technology long shot — the detection of gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916.

You might think that “literary death match” refers to any Tuesday morning staff meeting in the beleaguered publishing industry, but in fact it’s a competitive reading, poetry slam-style, and it’s coming to Stony Brook Southampton’s Avram Theater.

Neal Gabler has turned his culture critic’s sights on none other than Barbra Streisand for his new book, and he’ll discuss it on July 9 at 6 p.m. to lead off the Amagansett Library’s free summer reading series, Authors After Hours.

The New ­York City Board of Education, in its infinite wisdom circa 1955, divided a long-established school district in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn to create banjo-shaped Wingate High. Had it not, I would have gone to legendary Erasmus Hall and been a classmate of the soon-to-be famous Barbra Streisand. But would I have noticed?

There are readings, and then there are readings out in the famous late-afternoon light of this water-surrounded place, taken in with a plastic tumbler of pinot grigio and soft cheese smeared on a cracker. That would be the Hampton Library’s Fridays at Five series in Bridgehampton, which begins on July 8.

Iris Smyles’s new book is a hybrid work, a mix of autobiographical fiction and humor writing that builds a witty, of-a-certain-moment novel. With an unpredictable blend of the confessional and the satirical, the absurdist and the heartfelt, Ms. Smyles chronicles the ins and outs and overnights of a 21st-century single writer-about-town who dwells in the country of her 30s, between youth and midlife.

When it came time for Iris Smyles to meet with the publicity people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to “do the usual thing of getting blurbs,” as she put it, for her book “Dating Tips for the Unemployed,” the ass-kissing and self-promotion could’ve sent her soul fleeing her body like a shirt ripped from a hanger. Instead, pausing in her consumption of some takeout, she noticed a promotion from the online company that had delivered it, a contest, really — your testimonial here, or something like.

Montauk. It’s all the rage. But there’s cool Montauk, day-tripping Montauk, partying Montauk, and then there’s a somewhat more authentic Montauk, exemplified by the grizzled veterans of the fish-stinking rocky promontory who’ve put their literary heads together to come up with an anthology celebrating the place.

While it is a truth that anyone who lives to old age will experience inevitable deterioration, the facts of each case go universally unacknowledged. The personal reality of decline is hard to express, takes time away from life itself, and conflicts with the abundance narrative — youth, marriage, sex, and childbirth are more celebrated. Who wants to dwell on death?

Chris Knopf has left the fabulous Hamptons behind for the browner pastures of the Bronx. In “Back Lash,” the seventh installment in what is the original of his several series of crime novels, the geographically pretentious reference has even been excised from the cover, the billing simply reading “A Sam Acquillo Mystery.”

Is history soft, malleable, open to interpretation? Or is it stiffly a matter of facts, immutable, regardless of the “perspective” (that overused word, at once inclusive and diminishing) of the beholder?

By Bruce Buschel

Stars-in-the-eyes young poet meets literary and art world icons in the Hamptons. And re-meets and reconsiders. And admires. And continues to honor and to create his own work.

Of contemporary spy novelists, Alan Furst is the undisputed king of historical espionage. The majority of his 14 novels are set in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s, dealing primarily with the machinations of resistance fighters and spies — with a love affair or two thrown in for good measure. At their best they are atmospheric and suspenseful, occasionally lyrical, and often infused with a dash of erotic heat; Mr. Furst is the rare contemporary novelist who writes well about sexuality.

In the famous arrogance of youth, old age is the shore we’ll never reach.

Especially in a presidential election year such as this one, it is timely and interesting to delve into the backgrounds of the forces that are shaping the political scene. Neil J. Young has given us a detailed and thought-provoking history of one of those movements in “We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics.”