Books

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.

“Knock Knock”

Suzanne McNear

Permanent Press, $28

    Feet in autobiography, heart in the novel, Suzanne McNear’s “Knock Knock” plays around with what’s what in the wide, seductive world of literary possibility.

    The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons’ library in the Bridgehampton Community House, which was has been closed for renovations, will celebrate its reopening Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. with a reception for the public and members of the alliance. The library has Long Island’s largest collection of horticultural books, magazines, and videos.

“Confessions of

Joan the Tall”

Joan Cusack Handler

CavanKerry Press, $21

    This is not a Holocaust story. So says Marilyn Gottlieb of her new book, “Life With an Accent,” which she’ll talk about at the East Hampton Library on Saturday.

    Each year since 2006, the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor has held One for the Books, a literary-themed fund-raiser. Up until this year, the idea was that various hosts would serve dinner and a book chosen by the event committee would be discussed (between tidbits of local gossip). To add a smidgen of intrigue, guests chose the book they wanted to discuss first, and only then was the host’s identity revealed. The books could be any kind: old, new, obscure, whatever.

“Hurt, the Shadow”

Carole Stone

Dos Madres Press, $16

    The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda famously wrote, “I sang for those who had no voice.” Carole Stone echoes the declaration in her new collection of poems, all of which are written in the imagined voice of Josephine Hopper. Ms. Hopper studied at the New York School of Art and was a painter her entire life, yet, as Lee Krasner did Jackson Pollock, she married a painter, Edward Hopper.

“Someone”

Alice McDermott

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25

    The first time I became enthralled with Alice McDermott’s fiction was when I read her second novel, “That Night,” a beautiful and haunting novel about an all-consuming first love set in the 1960s on Long Island. Through a 10-year-old narrator, a neighbor next door, Ms. McDermott brilliantly and sensuously evokes a world of dangerous love, loss, fear, and desperation through the prism of a single summer night.

Bookish Dinners

    Where renovations and expansions continue apace, as at Sag Harbor’s venerable John Jermain Memorial Library, can a fund drive be far behind?

    The library’s capital campaign will be bolstered once more by One for the Books, a raft of benefit dinners held at various residences and attended by Sag Harbor authors ready to be chatted up or peppered with questions. This year the dates are Oct. 12 and 19 — yes, two Saturdays, for you weekenders out there — from 6 to 8 p.m., though who really knows once the booze starts flowing. Tickets cost $100.

“Alterations”

Rita Plush

Penumbra, $9.99

    Rita Plush, the author of a group of stories published under the title “Alterations,” tells us in her introduction that these are stories that have lived in her memory and “hark back more than fifty years.” Perhaps that’s the problem. We’ve heard and read similar stories of early immigrant Jewish life many times before. They are moving but well-worn territory.

Simon Says

    Not only is Simon Van Booy one of the more talented young fiction writers going, his first published work appeared in this newspaper. Yes, that’s self-referential of us to point out, but we thought you’d like to know. He has written well-received collections of short stories, one of which, “Love Begins in Winter,” won a Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and has just come out with his second novel, “The Illusion of Separateness.” He’ll talk about it on Wednesday at noon for a brown bag lunch at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

“Tomorrow There

Will Be Apricots”

Jessica Soffer

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24

   Very little in this book is what I expected it to be.

A Wainwright Homecoming

    Laura Wainwright of the East Hampton Wainwrights will pay a visit to the East Hampton Library on Saturday, “Home Bird,” her book from a year ago, in hand. Subtitled “Four Seasons on Martha’s Vineyard,” it chronicles the life there of an observant and thoughtful nature-lover — a life not unlike many on the South Fork.

“Long Island Oddities”

John Leita and Laura Leita

History Press, $17.99

   John Leita and Laura Leita have compiled a collection of accounts, enriched by contributions to their Internet blog over the last 10 years, that share some of Long Island’s oddities. Their book, titled, appropriately enough, “Long Island Oddities: Curious Locales, Unusual Occurrences, and Unlikely Urban Adventures,” comprises six chapters: “Roadside Oddities,” “Oddly Abandoned,” “Ghosts Among Us,” “Close Encounters of the Odd Kind,” “Phantastic Legends,” and “A Grave Difference.”

“Without a Claim”

Grace Schulman

Mariner Books, $14.95

“Loopers”
John Dunn
Crown, $25

    Sometimes it takes an outsider to really appreciate a place. Remember Maycroft? That immense hulk of a mansion that for years loomed over North Haven in glorious Miss Havisham decrepitude? Though it was bought, entirely renovated, and hidden away behind gates, it may linger in the popular consciousness here as the former home of a private school for girls and then the Rainbow Preschool. But who knew one wing once housed a bunch of itinerant caddies?

“The Illusion of

Separateness”

Simon Van Booy

Harper, $23.99

   As the title of Simon Van Booy’s gentle and lovely new novel, “The Illusion of Separateness,” might suggest, people are connected and intertwined in ways that are not always immediately apparent. Sometimes the manner people are linked never becomes apparent to them at all, but that does not necessarily signify a lack of connection.

“The Letters of

William Gaddis”

Edited by Steven Moore 

Dalkey Archive, $34.50

   Among postwar American novelists, no one was more elusive, and thus engendered more curiosity, than William Gaddis (save Thomas Pynchon, of course). In an era when authors like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal used media to their great advantage, Gaddis sat for few interviews, fewer pictures, and, by my counting, only one television appearance.

Confessions at Canio’s

    Canio’s: the independent gift of a bookstore that keeps on giving. On Saturday, for instance, Joan Cusack Handler, an author of several volumes of poems, will drop by the Sag Harbor shop for a reading from her new book, “Confessions of Joan the Tall,” a lyrical recounting of her Catholic youth in the working-class Bronx of the Eisenhower years. Ms. Handler runs CavanKerry Press in New Jersey and lives part of the year in East Hampton. The reading starts at 5 p.m.

    Indie, activist, hip, smart, relevant? Then you will want to know that the Feminist Press, a nonprofit literary publishing house that takes pride in being all that and more, is holding its annual Hamptons fund-raiser on Sunday, and that B. Smith’s restaurant on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor is the place for the like-minded to be.

   Sylvester Manor spawned two books following a seven-year archaeological dig there, conducted under the direction of Stephen Mrozowski, director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts.

“The Manor”

Mac Griswold

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $28

   “The Manor” is a fresh and invigorating book reporting on 30 years of Mac Griswold’s search for the truth about the secrets of the manor house located on a creek near the north shore of Shelter Island. In 1653, its builder and owner, Nathaniel Sylvester, owned the entire island and ruled it as a European feudal kingdom — a plantation, as it was politely called.

   Mac Griswold will speak about “The Manor” at the site itself, Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, on Saturday at 2 p.m. Blankets and beach chairs are suitable for the free outdoor session, during which the author will read, field questions, and sign copies of the book (available for purchase, naturally). Reservations at [email protected] have been requested.

    The East Hampton Library’s Authors Night keeps growing, but then, it’s a fund-raiser, so who’s complaining? Saturday’s mammoth and tented event, which starts at 5 p.m. at the Gardiner Farm at 36 James Lane in the village with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, boasts more than 1,000 expected attendees, untold mountains of books for purchase, and over 100 writers ready to sign them and chat.

Mark Doty on “Writer’s Almanac”

    Mark Doty, the Springs poet who won a National Book Award in 2008 for his collection “Fire to Fire,” will have one of his poems, “In the Community Garden,” read on Saturday on American Public Media’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” given voice weekly and richly by Garrison Keillor of “Prairie Home Companion” fame. It can be heard locally on WPPB 88.3 FM.

    The day is, by program tradition, Mr. Doty’s birthday.

Cuba Si, College . . . Also Si