Books

    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.

The eyes of the fox are shells,

Her home is sand, this luminous beach.

She is washed by saltwater, bleached by sun,

Wrapped in the calcium ribbon of shellfish.

Her body is a skeletal map, a lens, a geographic mark.

Did she leave the security of oaks,

Descend the dune of scrub and marl,

Or rise, carried by the waves of the Sound?

Myriad things come forth

To make the map of eyes and bone,

To mark the art of shell and stone.

Water, wind, stone, luminous sand, wind, water . . .

    Let’s start with the upbeat. Marsha King’s Kickstarter campaign in support of her forthcoming self-published book, “A Fine Day for Fishing,” surpassed its goal. The increasingly popular fund-raising tool in this brave new world of do-it-yourself brought in 79 contributors and more than $3,500 in pledges before wrapping up on Nov. 1.

“Still Writing”

Dani Shapiro

Atlantic Monthly Press, $24

    The novelist who taught my writing workshop liked to tell us that people who have had happy childhoods start hedge funds or run for Congress — but they don’t become writers. While I wouldn’t put money on that equation, Dani Shapiro, in “Still Writing,” her elegant, inspiring, and practical guide to living the writer’s life, is a vivid illustration of his point.

The Fall of the College

    So what do you think went wrong at Southampton College: mere mismanagement? Perpetually insufficient funding for the redheaded stepchild of the Long Island University system? Deep-pocketed trustees failing to pony up as promised? Or was it doomed from its misguided Vietnam War-era conception as a safe haven for academically uninspired rich kids seeking to avoid the draft . . .

“Memories

of a Marriage”

Louis Begley

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.95

     I live in Springs. I have no idea how they live South of the Highway.  

    Rock stars, movie divinities, hedge fund wizards, white-collar bandits — the world lifts its wondering eyes to the oceanside Hamptons. TVs and tabloids, commercial books and magazines, they all feed on fame and fortune.

    But what if the truth got out?

Kathryn Levy, There and Here

    Perusing this page on a westbound Hampton Jitney? Valued reader, much thanks. But your time in the city doesn’t mean you can’t get a dose of South Fork-style culture. Tomorrow night at 7, Kathryn Levy, a Sag Harbor poet, will be bending the paperback covers of her new collection, “Reports,” for a reading at Poets House, the archive and cultural center at 10 River Terrace in Manhattan.