Books

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.

Hold the hoarding, bring the purposeful mess. So says Durell Godfrey, thematically, artistically, literally, in her just-out “Color Me Cluttered: A Coloring Book to Transform Everyday Chaos Into Art” (Perigee, $15). Ms. Godfrey, an East Hampton illustrator and photographer once with Glamour magazine and now with The Star, will talk about her work and the book and sign copies of it tomorrow at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

It’s not easy criticizing a writer who gives independent bookstores a million bucks just because he likes them, and who a year later, out of the largesse of his one-man bailout program, doubles down and offers to pay their employees’ Christmas bonuses.

From “Neuron Mirror” by Virginia Walker and Michael Walsh.

In 1979, Lorraine Dusky, a journalist, published “Birthmark,” a memoir about relinquishing a child — her daughter — to adoption. The book detailed Ms. Dusky’s sense of loss, gave voice to a perspective not yet widely heard, and established Ms. Dusky’s role as a writer of adoption literature and figure in the adoption reform movement.

If you don’t happen to get enough reading in during your extensive Friday morning purgation following the Turkey Day indulgence, you could always visit a bookstore.

One useful framework for classifying the protagonists of mystery novels, as Agatha Christie’s devoted readers well know, is that there are Poirots and there are Marples.

The winter/spring issue of The Southampton Review celebrates two heavyweight novelists recently departed, James Salter of Bridgehampton and E.L. Doctorow of Sag Harbor.

Anthony Minardi has such an extensive résumé he needs a spreadsheet to keep track of it all, which he does across more than three pages at the back of his latest endeavor, “The Wetlands Field Guide,” just published through Xlibris.

When Morris Dickstein talks about “the art and challenges of memoir writing” at Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor on Sunday, the eminent culture critic and professor will more than know of what he speaks, he will be speaking from his own recent history and recent work — his well-received “Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education.”

Publishing is changing, we keep hearing. That gnashing of teeth? Our own molars as we try to suss out what’s true, what’s possible. What is the future?

It’ll be big doings for the Pushcart Prize’s 40th anniversary and the official hailing of the release of the new Pushcart anthology, “Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses.”

When four teenagers killed a 13-year-old behind a Smithtown school by stuffing rocks down his throat it became a cautionary tale for kids like Matthew McGevna, who went on to fictionalize it into his debut novel in a tried-andtrue attempt to get at the crux of the matter through storytelling.