Books

Alafair Burke, a talented author of domestic noir, is back with “The Better Sister,” exploring sibling rivalry and the dark underbelly of family life.

Paul McCartney, Amagansett resident and grandparent (and wasn’t he with some band once?), has just come out with his first picture book, “Hey Grandude,” while the McMullans return with a tale of two French bulldogs and Susan Verde brings a heart-restorative “I Am Love” for worried kids.

“The Great American Sports Page” has Mike Lupica on the brother of a football-playing fireman killed on 9/11, Robert Lipsyte on Dick Tiger, a boxer with a championship belt and a champion's conscience, and the timeless hyperbole of Grantland Rice.

John O’Malley’s “Urethane Revolution” is a surprisingly compelling and sometimes moving firsthand history of how the development of urethane wheels took skating to where it is today — a cultural phenomenon and, as of next summer, Olympic sport.

We’ll never tire of Elvis, and, when it comes to rock ’n’ roll, he represents the exponential leap from what was to what is, a point that is well made in Richard Zoglin’s “Elvis in Vegas,” which chronicles the King’s return to live performing from the self-imposed gulag of his B-movie-making period.

Michael Shnayerson’s “Boom” traces the growth of a burgeoning postwar art world and its expansion into the head-spinning mega-market it is today, fueled by insatiable collectors, resourceful, combative art dealers, and a shifting array of artists.

The 12 linked stories in Joel Mowdy’s debut collection offer a 1990s tour of young lives in a place not so very far from the Hamptons, but very far indeed psychically and economically.

From Lucas Hunt’s latest thematically linked collection of poems, “Hamptons,” published by Thane & Prose.

The East Hampton Library’s Authors Night benefit will convene once again at 555 Montauk Highway in Amagansett, with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, hobnobbing, and book signings starting at 5 p.m. on Saturday.

Clay Risen’s engaging “The Crowded Hour” tells the story of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, while focusing on the Spanish-American War as the turning point in America’s role in the larger world.

In “The Urethane Revolution,” John O'Malley tells “the greatest story never told in extreme sports history,” the 1975 birth of skateboarding, courtesy of a “hippy skunkworks of garages and shacks” in the Southern California sunshine. He'll read from it at a book launch at the Montauk Beach House on Friday, Aug. 9.

With “American Moonshot,” Douglas Brinkley has written a magisterial history of the space age and an affectionate valentine to those brave astronauts who flew to the moon, the politicians who dealt with the art of the possible, and above all to John F. Kennedy. He'll be at Authors Night in Amagansett on Aug. 10.