Books

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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. 

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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