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Books

South Fork Poetry: ‘The Overlook in Winter’

No ships off the empty coast in February? No nothing? The birds say different.

Feb 14, 2024
Who’s Afraid of Betty Friedan?

Rachel Shteir delivers a fresh, scholarly reassessment of a legendary second-wave feminist who’s taken her lumps in recent years.

Feb 14, 2024
Writers Speak: From the Horrors of Gilgo Beach

A reading by Vanessa Cuti, the author of “The Tip Line,” a thriller based on the Gilgo Beach murders, will launch the monthly Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton.

Feb 14, 2024
Dear Dying and Dead

Carole Stone’s latest collection offers understated poems of loss, widowhood, and forging on, but nowhere is there self-pity or bitterness, only optimism.

Feb 7, 2024
Looking for Ireland

In her memoir “Castles & Ruins,” Rue Matthiessen looks to recapture the mystery and magic of Ireland — and of her mother.

Jan 31, 2024
A Designer for the Rest of Us

Stan Herman’s memoir details the successful career of a designer both popular and commercial, while evoking all the color and character of the old garment district.

Jan 24, 2024
Land of the Disappeared

In “Lost Long Island,” Richard Panchyk lays out 21 examples of industries, people, places, things, and ways of life that have vanished from our fair Island.

Jan 17, 2024
Montauk’s ‘Stark Beauty’

Céline Keating’s novel tells a story of Montauk vanishing before our eyes, with all the underlying social and economic tensions and environmental woes triggered by its booming popularity.

Jan 10, 2024
The Son Also Rises

With “Quiet Street,” Nick McDonell has penned the unlikeliest of memoirs, detailing success and more success among the one percenters.

Jan 3, 2024
The 10 Best Books of 2023

Best-read man picks 10 best books, for the best year-end list you’ll find.

Dec 28, 2023
Murdoch and Fox: Careful What You Wish For

Electing an American president was Rupert Murdoch’s dream turned nightmare, Michael Wolff writes in his gossipy, occasionally obscene account of power and politics, “The Fall.”

Dec 20, 2023
Finding Solace

Idylls at an artist’s compound in Springs, an allegory for our times, and calming words of affirmation: It’s The Star’s kids’ book roundup.

Dec 13, 2023
On Wooley Pond

In his collection of essays Ralph Sneeden’s muse is the waters of North Sea and the South Shore, from boating to surfing, from boyhood to late middle age.

Dec 6, 2023
Loss Observed

Richard Brockman has written a deeply personal account of how he slowly, painfully freed himself from the trauma of his mother’s suicide in order to reclaim and recreate the narrative of his life.

Nov 30, 2023
M.F.A. Open House and Reading 

The M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton is offering an open house at the campus’s Lichtenstein Center, with readings by faculty and students. It starts at 6 p.m. on Dec. 6 in Chancellors Hall.

Nov 29, 2023
Lou Reed: Forever Becoming

Will Hermes gives us Lou Reed in full: complicated, scandalous, arty, poetic, ambisexual, temperamental, a battler through critical and commercial disappointments.

Nov 21, 2023
Woman in the Trenches

In “Fierce Ambition” Jennet Conant resurrects a tenacious female war correspondent, Maggie Higgins, largely ignored by journalistic history.

Nov 15, 2023
Beneath Secret Lives, More Secrets

With “The Helsinki Affair” Anna Pitoniak ventures into what John le Carré called the secret world, where spies can have lives even more hidden than those that come with their tradecraft — a potentially disastrous duality. 

Nov 9, 2023
Book Markers: From Kafka to Kroeger

Francis Levy talks his new story collection, “The Kafka Studies Department,” while Brooke Kroeger and David Alpern discuss her book “Undaunted” and women in the history of journalism.

Nov 2, 2023
American Women in Saigon

Alice McDermott’s new novel gives us remarkably realistic characters while fleshing out the zeitgeist of the 1960s as experienced by American women expats in Vietnam.

Nov 2, 2023
David, Meet Goliath 

This medical mystery broadens its concerns into an exploration of the intransigence and arrogance of the giant bureaucracy that is the U.S. Army.

Oct 26, 2023
A Prophet of Environmentalism

How Kurt Vonnegut, acerbic citizen of Planet Earth, anticipated the current ecological crisis and the need to go green.

Oct 19, 2023
Influence and Anxiety

Alice Carriere, daughter of famous artist-and-actor parents, blows away the standard memoir fare with graphic accounts of self-abuse and a blitz of pharmaceuticals.

Oct 11, 2023
Beauty and the Beast

William J. Mann’s “Bogie & Bacall” plows into the star couple’s roughly decade and a half together — insightfully and exhaustively.

Oct 5, 2023
Life Lessons From Emerson

Mark Matousek will elucidate “Lessons From an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life” on Friday at The Church in Sag Harbor.

Oct 5, 2023
A Life in the Book Biz

John Sargent’s memoir reveals an informed guide to modern publishing, and then some: from heading up Macmillan to fighting off Amazon.

Sep 27, 2023
Book Markers: Schultz and Schulman, Homes and Bernstein

Philip Schultz and Grace Schulman talk poets and poetry at Duck Creek, while A.M. Homes and Carl Bernstein hash out the political moment.

Sep 27, 2023
Book Markers: Honors, Tragedies, Readings

Paul Harding longlisted, Richard Brockman as survivor, Fran Castan and Canio Pavone read.

Sep 21, 2023
Reversals of Fortune 

The 30 stories in Francis Levy’s “The Kafka Studies Department” add a lightly absurdist take on human psychology to the landscape of literary brevity.

Sep 21, 2023
Looking for Mr. Bunbury

“Gays on Broadway” is not a comprehensive study. What it is is an idiosyncratic and arch amalgam of history, criticism, and juicy gossip.

Sep 14, 2023