Books

“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.

“Updike”

Adam Begley

Harper, $29.99

John Updike was, undoubtedly, one of the most gifted American prose stylists of the 20th century. And also one of its most prolific. Along with over 20 novels, Updike published countless short-story collections, poems, essays, reviews, and assorted miscellanea, most of it appearing in The New Yorker, with which the author had a roughly 50-year relationship.

“Eleven Days”

Lea Carpenter

Vintage Contemporaries, $15.95

Lea Carpenter’s novel, “Eleven Days,” is the story of a single mother, Sara, and her son, Jason, a member of this nation’s class of elite warriors. It’s about the 11 days of reflection and angst she suffers while waiting to find out what has happened to her only child, who went missing during a mission that coincided with the one that brought down Osama bin Laden.

“Welcome to the

Monkey House:

The Special Edition”

Kurt Vonnegut

Dial Press, $18

The female praying mantis bites off its partner’s head during copulation. In the title story of “Welcome to the Monkey House,” Kurt Vonnegut introduces a biological paradigm in which the female entices men not to sex and death, but only death. The collection has just been re-released in a “Special Edition” edited by Gregory D. Sumner.

Dissatisfied with your commencement address? With the uninspiring words of the gray senator who sits on the obscure subcommittee? Or the earnestness of the heiress who funneled her wealth into some worthy but uninteresting nonprofit?

Then it’s the Seven Stories Press to the rescue, fresh from the printing plant with Kurt Vonnegut’s “If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?” The slim volume is subtitled “Advice to the Young,” which is further appended with “The Graduation Speeches,” chosen and with an introduction by an old Indianapolis friend, the writer Dan Wakefield.

Alice McDermott Online

Why fight it? Let’s go deep digital: A “virtual author talk” with Alice McDermott will crackle to life onscreen at the East Hampton Library on Monday, when Tom Beer, the books editor at Newsday, leads a discussion about the author’s latest, “Someone.”

The novel, which was on the long list for a 2013 National Book Award for fiction, traces the highs and lows of an Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn before the Great Depression. The talk will happen from noon to 1 p.m., with time for questions and answers. Registration is with the reference desk.

“The Wherewithal”

Philip Schultz

W.W. Norton, $25.95

Philip Schultz’s “The Wherewithal” is an ambitious, bracing book about large-scale suffering and small-scale guilt. Set in San Francisco in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, the book inhabits several hells: two countries rent by war, a city bursting with the unemployed and terrorized by a serial killer, a German-occupied town in Poland whose citizens butcher their Jewish neighbors.

The Amazon vs. Hachette Book Group dispute, which is making headlines across the country as authors, bloggers, and angry customers speak out against the Internet giant, is also affecting the East End, which has a robust community of writers, many of them published by Hachette.

“Midnight in Europe”

Alan Furst

Random House, $27

Nearly 75 years later, there are no doubt people who imagine that Europe suddenly awoke on a Sept. 2 morning and found itself at war (again), Germany having invaded Poland the day before. Logic and historians tell us, however, that World War II did not ignite spontaneously. It came after a long, ominous buildup and with a great deal of foreshadowing in the form of various struggles between republicanism and fascism — most notably the Spanish Civil War, waged between July 1936 and March 1939.

In recent years Michael Shnayerson has chronicled the most significant stories on the South Fork for Vanity Fair, from the neutron bombshell of the former Hummer magnate Ira Rennert’s 100,000-square-foot Fair Field estate landing in the Sagaponack dunes to the land-grab lawsuit against the centuries-old White farming family in that village.

Part history, part distillation of the memoirs of Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Tadeusz Borowski, and others — Matthiessen has constructed a meditation on the “incipient evil in human nature” and our capacity for forgiveness.

“Wetiquette”

Peter Spacek

Ditch Ink, $8.95

    You have purchased a brand-new surfboard. It’s set you back about $1,000, but for years you’ve wanted to learn how to surf. “It’s on my bucket list,” you’ve told your friends.

    So, here goes. You’ve successfully taken the board, enshrouded in its protective bag, down off the car rack. You begin taking the board out of the bag in the parking lot, but notice the look of annoyance on the face of the surfer waiting to pull into the spot next to you. The surf is good. He’s hot to get in the water.