Books

   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.

    Tom Clavin will discuss “The DiMaggios: Three Brothers, Their Passion for Baseball, Their Pursuit of the American Dream” on Saturday for the Amagansett Library’s Authors After Hours series.

    He has been on a baseball biography tear in recent years, this book coming hard on the heels of two others about stars of the New York City scene, Gil Hodges, of the lamented Brooklyn Dodgers and later the often lamentable Mets, and the Bronx Bombers’ Roger Maris, dubbed in that book’s subtitle “Baseball’s Reluctant Hero.”

And Now, Authors After Hours

    Here’s a summer reading series of some note. Authors After Hours starts Saturday at the Amagansett Library at 6 p.m., when Paul Tough, who has been an editor at The New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, weighs in on the importance simple gumption plays in children’s future life outcomes. More so than I.Q., he argues in “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.”

“Cooper and the

Enchanted Metal

Detector”

Adam Osterweil

Namelos Books, $18.95

   Goodbye school, hello summer reading. “Cooper and the Enchanted Metal Detector” is a novel for middle-grade readers that takes place over the course of a pivotal summer for Cooper, the 10 (or perhaps 11)-year-old protagonist. A complete epoch can occur bookended by June and August, and Adam Osterweil, who has brought young readers “The Comic Book Kid” and “The Amulet of Komondor,” among others, seems to know all about the arc of summer.

A Summer of Friday Authors

    There are readings, and then there are readings at which you can wipe your mouth of a toothsome hors d’oeuvre, rise from your folding chair, and direct a question of your choosing at the author in attendance, plastic tumbler of chardonnay in hand.

   During a recent visit with Grace Schulman, a poet, translator, and professor, she remarked that the phone lines at her house were full of static.

    But she hadn’t called for a repair, she said — her Springs house, and the beaches and all of the corners of the hamlet, are a refuge where she takes in the observations that later emerge in her poems.

    A former poetry editor at The Nation, where she revived a poetry contest, Ms. Schulman directed the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for a decade.

“My Daughter, Myself”

Linda Wolfe

Greenpoint Press, $20

   On a Mother’s Day visit to Texas to see her only daughter, Jessica, mother of two small children, a mother’s worst nightmare begins. Suffering from dizziness and a splitting headache, Jessica is rushed to the emergency room. A CT scan and “every test known to women” are given and Jessica is sent home, diagnosed with a migraine.

“Dreadful”

David Margolick

Other Press, $28.95

New From Rosenblatt (et al.)

    Oh sure, it’s a group reading, but there must be privileging. At least when Roger Rosenblatt clears his resonant throat to offer up some new prose — in this case, from “The Boy Detective,” a forthcoming memoir about growing up in the Big Apple.

   The reporter turned essayist turned novelist Tom Wolfe, seen through his own writings, will be the subject of a staged reading at Guild Hall tomorrow night at 8. Curated by Judith Auberjonois — “ I hate to use that word,” she said, “because it is a little too trendy, but I did curate it” — “Big Bad Wolfe” has her husband, Rene, playing the author, via excerpts from his work starting with the early 1960s.

    East End and New York poets will turn out in force Saturday for one of their own, Harvey Shapiro, who will be remembered through recollections and readings of his work starting at 6 p.m. at Stony Brook Southampton.

    Mr. Shapiro, who lived in Brooklyn and East Hampton, was the author of numerous collections of poems, his most recent being “The Sights Along the Harbor,” from 2006. He was an editor at The New York Times Magazine and, from 1975 to 1983, the editor of The Times Book Review. He died on Jan. 7 at the age of 88.

    Norman (Fish) Finelli is an old-fashioned kid. He’s been feeding coins into his piggy bank, actually a ceramic lobster bank, to save up — not for a Jet Ski, but for a Seagull, “one of the finest motorboat engines ever made,” which is going to go on this leaky bucket of a boat he’s fixing up.

Real Estate Horrors — Aloud

    Don’t dare show your face in public? Have others show theirs. Anonymous x Two, the ladies who dished the dirt so hard on the real estate biz here they had to remain in hiding, are having a reading of their recent book, “The Hamptons Real Estate Horror Show,” on Saturday from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at the Springs Presbyterian Church.

“Origins of the Past”

Edited by Tom Twomey

East End Press, $40

    Chroniclers, diarists, and historians often must have felt what East Hampton’s master mechanic Nathaniel Dominy IV scribed on the rear of a metal tall-case clock dial he made in 1788: “Where oh! Where shall I be when this clock is worn out?” Heaven may have been the answer Dominy was suggesting, but to the recorder or analyst of history the perfect solution is to be published and remain a viable source of information.

David Margolick on “Dreadful”

    Here’s a title to prick up your ears: “Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns.” Burns, a conflicted man of no small measure of inner turmoil and anger, came out with “The Gallery” in 1947, a debut collection of related stories praised for its descriptions of wartime Italy. It contained an early depiction of what it was like to be gay in the military and sold 500,000 copies.

“Caught”

Jeff Nichols

CreateSpace, $9.99

   About two chapters into this book I was poised to dislike it, but like a “Trainwreck,” the title of Jeff Nichols’s memoir published in 2009 and turned into a movie two years later, I found it impossible to avert my eyes.

“Murder on Long Island”

Geoffrey K. Fleming

and Amy K. Folk

History Press, $19.99

Claire Reed Toughs It Out

    Claire Reed left behind a privileged life of country clubs and golf outings to wade hip deep into the feminist fights, civil rights struggles, and disarmament movement of the latter part of the last century. She would become a tireless organizer and activist for a number of progressive nonprofits, and the right-hand woman of Bella Abzug leading up to and during Abzug’s Congressional career.

Mac Griswold on “The Manor”

    A trip into Shelter Island’s deep past — to say nothing of down “the slave staircase” at the island’s storied Sylvester Manor — awaits the historically curious on Saturday at 3 p.m., when Mac Griswold discusses the particulars of her new book, “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island.” The talk, part of the Sag Harbor Historical Society’s annual meeting, will take place at the Annie Cooper Boyd House on Main Street in that village.

“Bad Boy”

Eric Fischl

Crown, $26

   One of the lasting impressions I have of Eric Fischl was a night at the Parrish Art Museum, where he was in discussion with an adjunct curator about Fairfield Porter’s influences. The curator, who is no longer with the museum, had developed an elaborate theory regarding Diego Velasquez’s influence on Porter, an idea at which Mr. Fischl scoffed.