Books

Friends, now is the time to hear your neighbors rise up and read from their workshopped essays, the result of their efforts in a class led by Carla Riccio of the Hayground School, who’s a former Dial Press editor, by the by. It starts at 2 p.m. on Saturday at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

“Think about it this way,” Jason the neck-tattooed motorcycle aficionado says to his adopted daughter in Simon Van Booy’s new novel, “Father’s Day,” explaining his lack of even one date during her two decades in his life, “I’m a single parent with no money, a dead-end job, a fake leg, bad teeth, and a criminal record. Plus I’m a recovering alcoholic. What loser could ever love a person like that?”

There are several historians who have given those of us who reside on the end of Long Island a series of enlightening books that examine epochs from our past with careful scholarship and surprising conclusions. Within the last 20 years, these authors have unearthed remarkable documents that open up what was once a foggy past obscured by folklore, misconceptions, and Eurocentric posturing.

Antje Katcher's posthumous collection, "Catechism," traces her poetry's arc from liturgical influences to the tranquillity of nature to personal history.

Alida Brill has impeccable timing. The assignment to review “Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty: The Memoir of a Romantic Feminist” came on March 8, International Women’s Day. And the book will be released this month amid an election cycle full of conjecture about the fate of Hillary Clinton, the first woman to launch a serious presidential campaign.

Paul Lisicky, whose new book, “The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship,” has drawn an inordinate amount of praise and attention, including the full treatment from The New York Times (a weekday review followed by one in the Sunday supplement a month later), has won a Guggenheim fellowship. The category is creative arts, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s website, with general nonfiction listed as his field of study.

From Grace Schulman’s 2013 collection, “Without a Claim.” Ms. Schulman, who lives part time in Springs, will be awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for lifetime achievement on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the National Arts Club in Manhattan.

The persona of Dan Giancola’s “Here’s the Thing” has been around the block and then some. The book’s title establishes the hip persona whose contemporary clichés are a cover-up for dealing with a dark world.

She may be “the best-selling author of 23 novels,” as the promotional materials say, but did you know Jodi Picoult wrote five issues of Wonder Woman for DC Comics? Just one tidbit from the Nesconset native’s long and successful writing career, which began with getting two short stories into Seventeen magazine while she was still at Princeton.

Curious about Guild Hall’s new Guild House and the artists in residence therein? Saturday is your chance to hear two of them read from their work: poetry by Tom Yuill, the author of “Medicine Show,” called a mix of “down-home plain speech and European high culture,” and fiction by Iris Smyles, whose “Dating Tips for the Unemployed” will come out in June.

Having been assigned Louis Begley’s new novel, “Kill and Be Killed,” I have, I confess, committed the first sin of book reviewers. I did not finish the novel. I apologize, but I just could not. If Mr. Begley and his publishers deign to read this modest review, they will undoubtedly use this admission to disregard any momentary sting my words may cause them, then chalk the whole thing up to snark.

You’d think by now the paperback release would’ve gone the way of the rooftop aerial antenna. It can’t all be about convenience for air travel, can it? Consumer-friendliness, maybe? But by the time the cheaper paperback comes out, the Gorilla Grodd of retail, Amazon, has already had its way with the price point. To say nothing of the e-book.

Nearly 30 years ago, I donated a collection of family letters from the World War I period to the New York Public Library. In her acknowledgment letter, the head of the library’s manuscripts department stated the importance of having “records of the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary times.” I was constantly reminded of that admirable turn of phrase as I read Patricia Luce Chapman’s thoroughly charming memoir, “Tea on the Great Wall: An American Girl in War-Torn China.”

“The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship” is a narrative of comradeship and grief, of love and woe. Paul Lisicky offers an honest and sometimes raw account of his relationships with two major players in his life, and outlines the intersection of loss that marked his experience. The work takes up Mr. Lisicky’s friendship with the writer Denise Gess — a long and intimate friendship of 30 years. He describes her vitality, her magnetic quality, her passion for writing and talking about writing.

The Pushcart Prize is celebrating its 40th anniversary; 40 years of bringing us the very best new writing from America’s small presses, whose sheer passion and strength of purpose keep them afloat in the face of the multinational publishing behemoths. Celebrate is the appropriate word.

First, Southampton Books, a spanking-new shop on Hampton Road in that village, was worth visiting for its rare books section, a rare thing hereabouts. Now comes the pull of author appearances — readings, signings, Q&A, you know the drill. The series opens on Saturday at 4 p.m. with Matt Marinovich and “The Winter Girl,” a psychologically rich tale of a disintegrating marriage, a dying S.O.B. of a father, an unnerving house next door, and, perhaps darkest of all, a bleak winter in Shinnecock Hills.

One-third of the full-time residents of Greenport are Latino, the first of many facts to surprise me in this lively and valuable contribution to understanding the Village of Greenport today. In her book “Village of Immigrants: Latinos in an Emerging America,” Diana R. Gordon, a retired academic, has drawn a portrait of the village that is thorough but not pedantic, granular at times, sweeping at others, and, at its core, a personal story: Ms. Gordon lives in Greenport, it is her hometown, and she wants its Latinos to stay and prosper.

The Southampton Review, the literary and fine arts journal of the M.F.A. in creative writing and literature program at Stony Brook Southampton, has announced the creation of the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, entries for which can be submitted until March 15.

“Hillary,” a striking hagiography just out from Jonah Winter and Raul Colon, unapologetically insists the time has come for Mrs. Clinton, who’s been summering in Amagansett of late, to ascend to the presidency, placing her in a historical timeline that begins with Shakespeare’s exemplar of strength, Queen Elizabeth I, and includes Joan of Arc and the fictional Rosie the Riveter.

In Dorothy Zaykowski’s “Sag Harbor: The Story of an American Beauty,” the historian writes: “Sag Harbor’s earliest newspapers published little in the way of local news, concentrating instead on a story, sermon, and both national and international events. It is likely that folks learned all the local gossip and goings on at the general store, barber shop, or on the street corner.”

It’s never too late to take inventory of your life, because the end always comes too soon. For Carole Stone, the time is now. “Late” is the poet’s most recent collection and catalogs the moments following a diagnosis of cancer. The book is divided into four sections: “After,” “Beginnings,” “Late,” and “Out East.” And more than just a prelude to the end, the poems are a decisive journal of rebirth.

Local Book Notes

Grace Schulman, a Springs poet and a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College in New York City, has been chosen to receive the 2016 Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for Distinguished Achievement in American Poetry. An awards ceremony is to be held in April at the National Arts Club in Manhattan.

“I only write what only I can write.” That is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s dictum regarding fiction, but surely it applies to the memoir as well.

Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak series will resume on Wednesday at 7 p.m. with a conversation between April Gornik and Andrea Grover, curator of special projects at the Parrish Art Museum. The event will take place in the Radio Lounge of Chancellors Hall.

“The Winter Girl” is Matt Marinovich’s second novel. I suppose you could call it a mystery, though it has an odd quality that sets it apart from standard murder mysteries. Set in Shinnecock Hills in the off-season, “The Winter Girl” is cold, dark, bleak, and wintry. The book, like an impending winter storm, is filled with menace and the threat of destruction.

I must admit to some trepidation about reading and reviewing Roger Rosenblatt’s new novel. His wonderful memoir “Making Toast” — about the sudden death of his 38-year-old daughter and how he moved in with her family, along with his wife, to provide care and comfort — never crossed the line from tender sentiment to sentimentality.

In the prologue to his novel “Slapstick,” which he called “the closest I will ever come to writing autobiography,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “My longest experience with common decency surely has been with my older brother, my only brother, Bernard. . . . We were given very different sorts of minds at birth. Bernard could never be a writer. I could never be a scientist.”

Gritty stories to hard sci-fi: the year’s 10 best books.

Reading the novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Simon Van Booy’s own biography, one learns of the surprisingly disparate number of places where he has lived: rural Wales, Kentucky, Paris, Athens, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And he hung out in the Hamptons for a while. Perhaps there were more addresses. But why mention all of these locales? The reason is endemic to Mr. Van Booy’s thinking and to the actions of his characters.