Books

“Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws”

Ellen NicKenzie Lawson

Excelsior Editions, $19.95

    It was near midnight on Jan. 16, 1920, and at the Park Avenue Hotel in New York, waiters and patrons were dressed in all black and drank liquor from black glasses. Let Ellen NicKenzie Lawson take it from there: “At midnight the ballroom was darkened and a spotlight focused on two couples ceremoniously taking a black bottle from an open coffin in the center of the room, pouring out the last drops, and holding black handkerchiefs to their faces to wipe away tears.”  

    The Old Schoolhouse in Greenport last held a kindergarten class in 1932. And now for something completely different: On March 15 Robin Becker will read there from “Tiger Heron,” her new collection of poems from the University of Pittsburgh Press with subject matter ranging from her lesbianism to her Russian-Jewish heritage to her upbringing in conformist 1950s America to art history.

“Seedtime”

Scott Chaskey

Rodale, $23.99

“A Shed for Wood”

Daniel Thomas Moran

Salmon Poetry, $21.95

    “A Shed for Wood” begins with a quote from Henry David Thoreau: “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.”

“The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Norton, $19.95

“The Heart Of

Everything That Is”

Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

Simon and Schuster, $30

    “The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend” is an inspired achievement. The authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin have dug deep into contemporaneous newspaper stories, eyewitness accounts, military records, and a long-lost autobiography dictated by Red Cloud, “the only American Indian in history to defeat the United States Army in a war, forcing the government to sue for peace on his terms.”

    Styron fans, prepare for an insider’s view: Alexandra Styron will be the first to the lectern for the spring’s Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton on Wednesday with “Reading My Father,” her recent book about her relationship with William Styron, who died in 2006. The free event starts at 7 p.m., upstairs in Chancellors Hall’s Radio Lounge. Ms. Styron is the author of a novel, “All the Finest Girls,” and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.

Chaskey on “Seedtime”

    Scott Chaskey, who, depending on your view, looks like Michelangelo’s vision of the Almighty or else a McCoy-hating Hatfield, has a new book out from Rodale, “Seedtime,” which comes with the explanatory subtitle “On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds.” Mr. Chaskey — need it be said? — runs Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, but also, less famously, lives in Sag Harbor, and he’ll remain at home in that village for a reading and book talk at Canio’s on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Elaine’s: One Last Course

    There is a poem in Philip Schultz’s book “Failure,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2008, called “The Reasonable Houses of Osborne Lane.” Shifting from “cottages slowly blooming into mansions” to “neighbors carried in and out of ambulances” to “long azure afternoons dragging shadows toward twilight,” its acute observations of the everyday are infused with grace and a hint of the elegiac.

It is a good thing to keep compilations of Truman Capote’s work up to date, in print, on the bookstore shelves, and in library catalogs.

“The Nicolls of

Sachem’s Neck”

Patricia and Edward Shillingburg

Cedar Grove Press, $25

    Have you ever wondered what the rest of the letter said, when you come across a mystifying tidbit reprinted in a book of letters where the editor has made selections all too sparingly, and without enough commentary to fill in the gaps?

“Almost Rain”

Simon Perchik

River Otter Press, $12.99

    Anyone who observes the weather can see how nature transforms things into other things; rain turns dirt into mud. Similar processes have their effects on human lives, only we take them more personally; the seasons feel as if they correspond to our actual beginning and end. In the poetry of Simon Perchik, this elemental realm merges with individual consciousness, in careful and courageous language, to bring polymorphic awareness to life.

For Ye of Some Faith

    “Recipes for a Sacred Life” may sound like one of those self-help books that will boost your wellness best if bypassed, but in fact it’s a collection of true stories drawn from the author’s life and aimed at a subtle, everyday kind of enlightenment.

“Nature Wars”

Jim Sterba

Broadway Books, $14.95

    Last September, deer became a deeply personal issue for me, and I crossed over to the other side, where I’d never been before.

    I live in the woods of the North Fork along with an expanding family of deer that I wish I didn’t have to see every day. Ten years ago I would hold my breath and run for my camera on the family’s occasional visits, exulting over my relationship to nature. I felt privileged and honored by their presence.

“Cries of the Lost”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $28

     A smartphone is a useful tool, although, say, reading a novel on one might leave something to be desired. How about reading a novel about one?

“From Scratch”

Allen Salkin

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27.95

    In the age of slow food, cooking reality shows, gourmet magazines, epicurean specialty shops, food blogs, celebrity chefs, and enough blockbuster cookbooks to fill a metropolitan library, it’s hard to believe that there was ever a time when the idea of a food network sounded like pure lunacy.

    When James Whitfield Thomson hemmed and hawed in describing just what his new novel, “Lies You Wanted to Hear,” was about, his daughter challenged him to think in terms of what would go on a movie poster. His answer: “What could make a good man do such a thing?”

“In Pinelight”

Thomas Rayfiel

TriQuarterly, $18.95

    “In Pinelight,” the sixth novel by Thomas Rayfiel, is narrated by an old, crotchety man living in a home for seniors. The novel is essentially a continuous reminiscing monologue. There is an interrogator who remains nameless and faceless throughout. We never hear his voice. What we do hear is the narrator responding to, or repeating, the interrogator’s questions.

“Death of the Black-Haired Girl”

By Robert Stone

    Even B+ Robert Stone is better than almost everybody else. The setup is conventional: an affair between a student and professor at a university bearing more than a passing resemblance to Yale. But the way it unravels is wholly unpredictable, as is every line of Mr. Stone’s dialogue — especially his New Yawk police talk — which remains (the author is 76) utterly realistic and yet somehow never clichéd.

    What follows is an excerpt from the poet Philip Schultz’s new “novel in verse,” more than 10 years in the making and due out from W.W. Norton in February. In it, a young man hides from the Vietnam draft by changing his name ever so slightly and going to work in obscure drudgery in the basement office of a Bay Area social services agency. He keeps himself busy, in part, by translating his mother’s diaries having to do with a 1941 slaughter of Jews by their Polish neighbors.     

“The Most of

Nora Ephron”

Alfred A. Knopf, $35

     When Nora Ephron died last year at the age of 71, there was an outpouring of personal and public grief greater than any I can recall for a contemporary American writer or film director. I knew her only as an acquaintance, an always charming and gracious presence, but her close friends still speak of other, more compelling qualities, especially her extraordinary generosity to those younger women — neophytes in her own professions — whom she mentored and encouraged.

Bulova Unbound

    “In 2013, a decrepit, abandoned former watchcase factory in a small, seaside town is undergoing an extreme renovation, to be re-imagined as a luxury apartment building.”

“& Sons”

David Gilbert

Random House, $27

     Add David Gilbert’s “& Sons” to the short list of this year’s best novels. Mr. Gilbert’s foot is on the gas from the very beginning of this ambitious, chance-taking novel and he never lets it up. He brilliantly balances a multilayered story of familial relationships and lifelong friendships and breathes new and exciting life into what can be the too familiar stories of father-son relationships and of writers and the tribulations of the writing life.

      While many Americans had some memory of or reaction to the recent 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Christina Haag had a more personal investment than most in the tributes and recreations of the events that day.

       Only a child herself at the time, she would come to know, befriend, and then fall in love with the president’s only son, John F. Kennedy Jr., a story she recounted as part of her memoir, “Come to the Edge: A Love Story,” published by Spiegel and Grau in 2011.

 Capote Christmas

       Truman Capote, whose fans are as diverse as they are legion, from macho Norman Mailer to your local florist, was never more sentimental than in “A Christmas Memory,” that autobiographical tale of his close boyhood relationship with his much older yet childlike cousin. Now, on Sunday at 1:30 p.m., two actors, Tom DeWolfe and Jere Jacob, will give voice to the story at the Amagansett Library.

       Country life in the F.D.R.-era South, fruitcakes, love, and loss — pull up a chair, won’t you? The reading’s free.

Poems of Parenthood

"Reports"

Kathryn Levy

New Rivers Press, $14.95

Return of the Lit Lunch

    Chris Knopf and Christina Haag will pull up chairs and clink silverware at this year’s benefit authors lunch at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor on Dec. 8. The noon to 2:30 p.m. meal comes courtesy of the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library.

    That library, of course, isn’t alone in undergoing a renovation and expansion, it’s just that in this case it’s been nigh unto interminable, perhaps making a celebratory lunch all the more so.

“The Boy Detective”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco, $19.99

    Roger Rosenblatt may have just invented a beguiling subgenre — call it mem-noir — in which remembrance loops along a dark trail of switchbacks and time-jumps like a memoir narrated by an erudite, shape-shifting shamus. The protagonist is the 11-ish Roger, who prowls his Manhattan neighborhood and his childhood as if he were a private eye. Lurking in the shadows is the 70-ish Roger, the real gumshoe, trying to figure out how everything and nothing has changed.

“Mary Coin”

Marisa Silver

Blue Rider Press, $26.95

    If, as the popular wisdom holds, a single picture is worth a thousand words, then it is not entirely surprising when an iconic photograph inspires a novel of some 325 pages. Neither is it surprising when, in the hands of a gifted writer, the resulting novel is a small masterpiece.

    The number of young people in today’s information-overloaded America who are managing to make a living writing poetry probably exceeds the nation’s current population of ivory-billed woodpeckers, but both birds and poets are indisputably endangered.