Books

In “Fierce Ambition” Jennet Conant resurrects a tenacious female war correspondent, Maggie Higgins, largely ignored by journalistic history.

With “The Helsinki Affair” Anna Pitoniak ventures into what John le Carré called the secret world, where spies can have lives even more hidden than those that come with their tradecraft — a potentially disastrous duality. 

Alice McDermott’s new novel gives us remarkably realistic characters while fleshing out the zeitgeist of the 1960s as experienced by American women expats in Vietnam.

Francis Levy talks his new story collection, “The Kafka Studies Department,” while Brooke Kroeger and David Alpern discuss her book “Undaunted” and women in the history of journalism.

This medical mystery broadens its concerns into an exploration of the intransigence and arrogance of the giant bureaucracy that is the U.S. Army.

How Kurt Vonnegut, acerbic citizen of Planet Earth, anticipated the current ecological crisis and the need to go green.

Alice Carriere, daughter of famous artist-and-actor parents, blows away the standard memoir fare with graphic accounts of self-abuse and a blitz of pharmaceuticals.

William J. Mann’s “Bogie & Bacall” plows into the star couple’s roughly decade and a half together — insightfully and exhaustively.

Mark Matousek will elucidate “Lessons From an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life” on Friday at The Church in Sag Harbor.

John Sargent’s memoir reveals an informed guide to modern publishing, and then some: from heading up Macmillan to fighting off Amazon.

Philip Schultz and Grace Schulman talk poets and poetry at Duck Creek, while A.M. Homes and Carl Bernstein hash out the political moment.

Paul Harding longlisted, Richard Brockman as survivor, Fran Castan and Canio Pavone read.

The 30 stories in Francis Levy’s “The Kafka Studies Department” add a lightly absurdist take on human psychology to the landscape of literary brevity.

“Gays on Broadway” is not a comprehensive study. What it is is an idiosyncratic and arch amalgam of history, criticism, and juicy gossip.

Helen Schulman’s new novel is a #MeToo tale driven by one question: “How could one woman do this to another woman?”

Coogan’s, a late, lamented neighborhood bar in Washington Heights, is the subject of a new book whose author will be at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton to talk about it with the saloon’s former owner.

Christopher Byrne considers the life and work of Terrence McNally, a giant of the American theater.

Go to this year’s Pushcart anthology to hear what’s not being talked about in polite company, to read work that would likely be banned in Florida, to be transported.

Eileen Myles, whose poems race headlong down the page, is nothing if not consistent, and prolific. Myles’s latest collection is “a Working Life.”

Public spaces needn’t be immutable, privatized, or useless. They can be claimed for the community good. Professor Setha Low takes a fresh look.

Colson Whitehead reads from his new novel, “Crook Manifesto,” Thursday night in Sag Harbor, while Bill Boggs is in East Hampton Saturday with “Spike Unleashed: The Wonder Dog Returns.”

Authors Night, Saturday, Aug. 12, Herrick Park, East Hampton. Be there.

Paul McCartney’s “1964: Eyes of the Storm” collects more than 200 photographs he took with a Pentax camera late in 1963 and early in 1964.

Here is the Jackie Bouvier Kennedy you may not know — photog, columnist, gal about town.

A Philip Schultz poem in tribute to the East Hampton artists Connie Fox and William King.

Women’s increasing numbers in and influence over American journalism is explored in “Undaunted” by Brooke Kroeger, a veteran correspondent and professor.

Carmela Ciuraru will talk to Katie Couric about “Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages” at Guild Hall on Monday night.

For his new one, Colson Whitehead returns to Harlem, this time in the 1970s, and Ray Carney, who’s busier than ever with his furniture store and his stolen goods.

Katie Couric is first up at the revived Fridays at Five, while Sunny Hostin visits the East Hampton Library with her new novel.

Laurie Anderson has compiled Lou Reed’s notes into a book showing how tai chi saved the rocker’s life and came to define his life.