Books

“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

“The Way of the Knife”

Mark Mazzetti

Penguin, $29.95

   No matter what political policies you embrace, “The Way of the Knife” is a lively, engaging, factual account of our real war against terrorism — and another real war between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

“Running on Empty”

John A. Strong

Excelsior Editions, $29.95

Fortune in His Eyes

    It’s a long way from escorting Elizabeth Taylor at the Broadway opening of Richard Burton’s “Hamlet” to mediating a prison riot at Attica. But David Rothenberg has not only lived it but written a memoir about it. “Fortune in My Eyes,” from Applause Books, recounts how one of the more successful publicists in theater (later a producer) went on to accompany former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to investigate how Nicaragua’s Sandinista government was treating captured Contra rebels in the 1980s. Among much else in a varied career in civil rights.

“My New Orleans,

Gone Away”

Peter M. Wolf

Delphinium, $24.95

   “Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands — and who knows what to do with it?” —Blanche DuBois, Scene 5, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

    Not only is The Southampton Review’s new and loaded summer edition out and about to be celebrated with a couple of readings, the fledgling TSR Editions is unveiling its first effort, a book of photos by the playwright Joe Pintauro, with a reception and gallery show — all tomorrow, all at Stony Brook Southampton.

    This weekend Peter M. Wolf will be making the rounds thrice over with his new memoir, “My New Orleans, Gone Away.” First, tomorrow at 5 p.m., he’ll read from the book and field questions about it for this summer’s iteration of the popular, shaded, and wet (with libations) Fridays at Five series at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton. Tickets cost $15.

    On Saturday at 5 p.m., it’s due north to Sag Harbor and the venerable Canio’s Books, and then on Sunday, he’ll stop by East Hampton’s friendly neighborhood bookshop, BookHampton, for a 2 p.m. reading.

“The DiMaggios”

Tom Clavin

Ecco, $25.99

    When I told my wife I was reviewing a book titled “The DiMaggios,” she asked me, “There was more than one?” There were, in fact, three — the brothers Joe, Dom, and Vince, all big-league ballplayers of varying skill levels and fame.

“The Art of Steampunk”

    “What is Steampunk? In three short words, Steampunk is Victorian science fiction.” So writes G.D. Falksen in his introduction to “The Art of Steampunk” by Art Donovan, just out in a revised second edition from Fox Chapel Publishing. Victorian is here meant as an evocation, referring to a heavily decorative look, an aesthetic, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically influenced by early industrialization.