Books

Here’s a cat story that won’t make you groan. First of all, Rupert, in Jules Feiffer’s latest book for children, “Rupert Can Dance” (Michael di Capua, $17.95), isn’t what you’d call cute, more like an orange Yoda on all fours. And he doesn’t just lie around, he’s got a passion for strutting and prancing while his owner, little Mandy, sleeps. He even uses her dancing shoes.

“Echoes of Heartsounds”

Martha Weinman Lear

Open Road, $9.99

Martha Weinman Lear’s new book, “Echoes of Heartsounds,” directly evokes her riveting, unsparing memoir “Heartsounds.” In the earlier work her husband, Hal, a beloved doctor, had a massive heart attack, followed by complications that led to his death at 57. The irony is not lost on Ms. Lear when, 30 years later, she has a coronary and ensuing infection and finds herself in the same hospital ward with the same attending physician.

“Only You”

Eileen Obser

Oak Tree Press, $14.95

Eileen Obser, freelance writer, editor, and teacher, has written a book about sex.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, “Only You” is a memoir about her experience as a 1950s teen bride in Queens, unable to give her young husband, Billy, what he clearly wants and expects on their wedding night. And every night thereafter — daytimes too — though it’s not for her lack of trying.

All in the family, sort of, the Springs and Pushcart Press families: Linda Coleman, whose memoir, “Radical Descent,” is newly published by Pushcart, and Bill Henderson, the press’s founder, both of whom live in the hamlet, will join up for a two-for-one reading and book chat on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

New Prize for Comic Fiction

Writers, you have until the end of the month to get your submissions in for the new Robert Reeves $1,000 Prize in Comic Fiction, courtesy of Stony Brook Southampton and judged by the college’s Daniel Menaker, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker. Stories of up to 5,000 words can be sent to The Southampton Review. The fee is $15.

“We won’t even try to tell you what we’re looking for,” a release said. “The comic impulse is so widely and variously expressed in fiction that it resists definition.”

At first glance, Linda Coleman’s “Radical Descent: The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary” looks like another entry in a familiar genre: confessions of a late-1960s, early-1970s radical leftist. Not so fast . . .

“A Certain Summer”

Patricia Beard

Gallery Books, $16

When a few days of Indian summer appear on the East End this autumn, pick up Patricia Beard’s debut novel, “A Certain Summer,” pack a picnic, and enjoy an afternoon of quiet beach reading.

Secrets of Disney Animation

John Canemaker, who won a 2005 Oscar for his animated short “The Moon and the Son,” an imagined conversation with his father, will venture into “the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie Magic,” according to his new book’s subtitle, through one Herman Schultheis next Thursday at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.

“Daring: My Passages”

Gail Sheehy

William Morrow, $29.99

Just as I was finishing Gail Sheehy’s “Daring: My Passages,” I noticed the headline of a story on the New York Times business page: “After a Year Under Bezos, Last Graham to Leave Post.” Katharine Weymouth, the granddaughter of Katharine Graham, the longtime Washington Post publisher, was stepping down. Her departure would bring down the curtain on 80 years of the Graham family’s connection to the prestigious newspaper that reported Watergate.

The Writers Speak series of readings returns to the Stony Brook Southampton campus Wednesday with Vijay Seshadri, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection “3 Sections.” Mr. Seshadri’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry magazine, and The New Yorker, as well as in four editions of The Best American Poetry anthology. He teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Reckless. What a name for a Mongol racehorse turned honorary U.S. Marine with two Purples Hearts, a Bronze Star, and an insatiable appetite for poker chips and beer. No way to treat a filly, you say . . . but then again, Reckless became a legend with a happy ending, no spoilers need apply.

“The Mother Court”

James D. Zirin

American Bar Association, $29.95

What do bishops, celebrities, politicians, generals, professional athletes, Holocaust victims, drug addicts, and just plain folks have in common? All of them have chosen the memoir as the literary vehicle to lay bare their inner lives.

So you go about your life

but there’s a thread unraveling

Each year

the reading of the devastating list

each name hanging in the New York air,

the lips of their children,

their parents,

their wives,

dropping them into place

One woman

presses the back

of another

helping her go on

And still it goes

still only on the A’s

The bell rings

all of them the hardest

Strangers become relatives

The litany

In her latest collection of poems, “Hurt, the Shadow,” Carole Stone gives voice to a historical figure almost never heard from, Josephine Hopper, the wife of the painter Edward Hopper. Ms. Hopper studied at the New York School of Art and was a painter in her own right, yet in marrying a man who would go on to become a giant on the American scene, she became known as his model. She was also a strong influence on his work.

“Kill My Mother”

Jules Feiffer

Liveright Publishing, $27.95

As I eagerly devoured “Kill My Mother,” Jules Feiffer’s brilliantly funny, moving (both emotionally and visually), multilayered film noir homage, I kept thinking this graphic novel could easily transfer to the screen — as an animated film. Hell, it already is an animated film on paper.

Every page in “Kill My Mother” is alive with movement, or what animators call “extreme poses”; that is, storytelling facial and bodily expressions that visually communicate the narrative to an audience.

“Where Nobody

Knows Your Name”

John Feinstein

Doubleday, $26.95

“Managing at that level is the worst job there is in baseball,” Buck Showalter, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles, once said of Triple-A ball, where he led a team for four years after having played his entire career in the minor leagues. “Why? Because no one wants to be there.”

“Shirley: A Novel”

Susan Scarf Merrell

Blue Rider Press, $25.95

We are silverfish under moonlight,

the glow of fireflies at dusk,

the warm embers of a woodstove.

We are calloused hands and hand-me-downs,

old dungarees and time-tested recipes.

We carry trays, dig holes, water plants,

massage bodies,

sing children to sleep.

We migrate from Montauk to Miami, Paris to Phuket. Aspen to Acadia.

We are in factories and in fields,

in bodegas and barns,

in kitchens and classrooms and carnivals.

We are new-born and older than death.

“Sally Ride”

Lynn Sherr

Simon & Schuster, $28

I’m going to come clean. The last time space flight held my attention was on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. In the decades since, I have been more aware of NASA’s failings: the aborted Challenger launch in 1986 that killed, among others, a social studies teacher. Or the terrible re-entry of the Columbia in 2003 that took the lives of seven astronauts. If we’re not finding intelligent life on Mars, I thought, who cares?

Paul Goldberger, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, former architecture critic for The New Yorker, and an East Hamptoner for many years, will lead a panel discussion of the work of the partners of Robert A.M. Stern Architects on Saturday starting at 2 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

The East Hampton Library’s Authors Night turns 10 on Saturday. The event has evolved quite a bit since its debut in 2005, growing to have more than 100 authors in attendance and becoming, as Dennis Fabiszak, the director of the library, put it, c

The main event is a cocktail reception and book signing at the Gardiner Farm. After the cocktail party, a number of private dinner parties with guest authors are held.

Bergen, Clinton, BookHampton

When Candice Bergen’s memoir “Knock Wood” came out in 1984, being chased by a young Jack Nicholson in “Carnal Knowledge” may still have been relatively fresh in the actress’s mind, but her days starring in the television series “Murphy Brown,” and Dan Quayle’s elevation of the character to cultural touchstone status, were yet to come, so there’s surely ample material for a follow-up.

While she’s at work on it, “Knock Wood” has been reissued in paperback, and she’ll read from it at BookHampton in East Hampton on Saturday at 5 p.m.

“Deadly Secrets”

Robert Boris Riskin

Black Opal Books, $12.49

Richard Ravitch, Johnny Carson, and Roger Ailes found importance by being useful. The authors of new books about them will be honored at Authors Night, the annual fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library, on Aug. 9.

“Man on the Run”

Tom Doyle

Ballantine, $27

Rare is the artist whose cultural significance is such that a biography is devoted to a single decade in his or her life. But Paul McCartney, a popular-music phenomenon for a half-century and counting, has created a body of work deserving the same scrutiny as that of his former band, the Beatles.

Don’t let the summertime eruption of author appearances put a crimp in your listening style, bibliophiles, just pull up a (preferably reserved) chair and take in the Amagansett Library’s answer to such a series, won’t you? It’s called Authors After Hours, coming to you free on Saturdays at the shingled Main Street edifice, this week at 6 p.m. with Jenny Offill and her second novel, “Dept. of Speculation,” billed as a portrait of a marriage.

“I Pity the

Poor Immigrant”

Zachary Lazar

Little, Brown, $25

At the very beginning of this intricate and finely wrought novel, its narrator, an American journalist named Hannah Groff, reveals two key elements of the book we’re about to read. The first is that it’s a story of fathers and children. She’s dining with her own father, from whom she’s often estranged, when she makes this observation. And on the next page Hannah, who’s investigating the murder of an Israeli poet, tells us, “What we need is a memoir without a self.”

The Fridays at Five author talks — a South Fork summer staple — start up again tomorrow at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.

This year’s program begins with Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, both experienced journalists, speaking about their book “The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend.” The book tells the story of the man behind the famed Sioux victory over Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Fran Castan and Scott Chaskey will read from their work on Sunday afternoon as the Poetry Marathon opens its 20th season at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett.

Ms. Castan, who lives in Barnes Landing with her husband, the artist Lew Zacks, is the recent recipient of the Long Island Poet of the Year award from the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in Huntington. She and Mr. Zacks are the co-authors of “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” a book of poems and illustrations published by Canio’s Editions.

Alex Russo, who drew graphic accounts of combat firsthand during World War II, and who was a member of Navy intelligence involved in the Normandy invasion and other landings, will read from his memoir, “Combat Artist: A Journey of Love and War,” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor tomorrow at 5 p.m.

The book also explores the experiences of an artist making his way in postwar America. Mr. Russo went on to teach at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and remains professor emeritus at Hood College in Frederick, Md. Also a poet, he lives in East Hampton.