Books

    Two thousand and twelve wasn’t a particularly good year for the literary novel, and I’m not sure what it says that so much of this year’s good reading centered on crime fiction. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that right now the crime genre is fiction’s most exciting and has, in many ways, replaced the social novel for telling us who we are. This 10-best list reflects that shift.

“May We Be Forgiven”

A.M. Homes

Viking, $27.95

   A.M. Homes, author of “Music for Torching,” “The End of Alice,” “In a Country of Mothers,” and others, has a new one out. It has lots of characters and it covers lots of ground. It has ambition, authority, and plenty of laughs. It has keen observation of contemporary culture in big enormous buckets; it’s nothing if not right now. Finally, and not incidentally, Ms. Homes’s new one is on the longer side for contemporary literary fiction. You get in and stay in for a while. Big.

   It has been well established that the Internet, for all its wonders, early on fell into the wrong hands and since then has tended to bring out the worst in people. Rage, for one thing, as Bill Henderson of Springs points out in his editor’s note for “Rotten Reviews Redux,” a new reissue of the Pushcart Press’s popular 1986 “literary companion.” Rage that when paired with the safety of anonymity leads to an explosion of dreck online the spray of which reaches even a Luddite like Mr. Henderson, who professes to own no computer.

    It’s a common enough experience. In junior high a kid wakes up to find his body transformed. Or . . . something. How about into an oversized reptile?

“Paris: A Love Story”

Kati Marton

Simon & Schuster, $24

   In the age of too much information, a brief memoir looks like a welcome relief at first — a respite from the tell-all exposé. In her slender “Paris: A Love Story,” Kati Marton gives us the bones of a rousing tale, a portrait of love and loss, chock full of the political players who have shaped world events over the last 50 years. Yet her narrative restraint often dims the light on what has clearly been a rich and unusual life. We have the facts, but we’re still missing a lot of the soul.

The Other Matthiessen

    He’s got the same long, patrician face, wavy hair, and, at least in his author photo, the familiar denim button-down. Not unlike a certain Sagaponack nature writer and Zen practitioner. Then, too, his just released debut novel spans “love in the ruins of the Mayan Yucatan” and “landscapes, rivers, and tidal estuaries” of the northeastern U.S., on to “the wayward collision of nature and civilization.”

“Walking Sideways”

Judith S. Weis

Cornell University Press, $29.95

  Did you know that there are species of crabs that spend their entire lives in freshwater? Or that there are air-breathing land crabs? Or that horseshoe crabs are not true crabs or even crustaceans? Or that the Japanese spider crab can weigh over 40 pounds and sport a leg span of 12 feet?

“Steinbeck in Vietnam”

Edited by Thomas E. Barden

University of Virginia Press, $29.95

A Plimpton, Hurrying

    Sarah Plimpton is a poet and a painter, so it’s not surprising that her debut novel would be impressionistic. “Hurry Along,” from Pleasure Boat Studio, has been called “a luscious non-narrative map of shifting emotional and physical landscapes born out of the quotidian lives of people, trees, animals, beaches, and more.”

  “Kurt Vonnegut: Letters”

Edited by Dan Wakefield

Delacorte, $35

    In the race for the best title of a collection of poems, the Street Press boys are neck and neck. Graham Everett, the founding editor of the press and of its accompanying magazine, has come out with a new one, “An Incomplete Dictionary of Disappearing Things.” One of the poets he publishes, Dan Giancola, The Star’s book reviewer this week, just released “Data Error,” but, better, also wrote “Part Mirth, Part Murder” and “Songs From the Army of the Working Stiffs” (Karma Dog Editions).

“American Rhapsody”

Carole Stone

CavanKerry Press, $16

One Eye on the Voting Booth

    Maryann Calendrille and Kathryn Szoka, the proprietors of that funkiest of South Fork institutions, Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, have been tapped for a different kind of speaking engagement — bookish yet political, money-minded yet charitable. On Monday, as Election Day looms, they’ll give a talk titled “East End Writers: Past and Present” at a fund-raising lunch for the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons. It starts at 12:30 p.m. at Muse in the Harbor on Main Street in Sag Harbor.

 “Back to Blood”

Tom Wolfe

Little, Brown, $30

Caro’s a Finalist

    Robert A. Caro, whose house in East Hampton has an accompanying uninsulated writing shed that’s known herculean bouts of key-pounding, has been named one of five finalists for a National Book Award in nonfiction. The title, need it be said, is “The Passage of Power,” the latest installment in what might be the biography of the age, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” published by Alfred A. Knopf. The winners will be announced on Nov. 14 at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan.

Talkin’ “Cloud Atlas”

So when this mysteriously titled art book, “Cappy,” written by Terry Wallace, an East Hampton gallerist, crossed my desk, I asked myself, who is Cappy? I was quickly reminded of an old adage regarding artists’ monographs — beware the dust jacket of an art book that doesn’t illustrate art. The cover’s photograph is of a craggy middle-aged Scandinavian fisherman type, squinting directly at me and the camera. And the illustration on the back is a haunting photograph of the same person as an ancient mariner.

 “Data Error”

Dan Giancola

Street Press, $15

In terms of literature, art, and society, we have left the postmodern building. What comes next is already well under construction, if not completely built. The new era has been called many things, post-humanism being one of the more provocative. Yet an even better term serves for context while reading Dan Giancola’s new collection of poetry, “Data Error,” and that is late elegiac.

In the Shadow of a Hospital

“Gil Hodges”

Tom Clavin and Danny Peary

New American Library, $26.95

    You know the joke. A Brooklynite has a gun with two bullets in it in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley, the man who moved the Dodgers west. So what happens? O’Malley gets plugged twice.

“Home Bird”

Laura Wainwright

Vineyard Stories, $19.95

  In many aspects, Martha’s Vineyard, the sea-wind swept island off the coast of Massachusetts, presents a mirror to the South and North Forks. Geologically, we seem almost connected: low hills, salt ponds, rocky headlands, and sandy beaches.

    This familiarity must have been part of what made Laura Wainwright, who spent much of her childhood in East Hampton, and whose family still lives here, choose to make the Vineyard her home.

“Ice Cap”

Chris Knopf

Minotaur Books, $25.99

    You’ve got to hand it to Chris Knopf: He knows how to have fun. His prose vaults across the page with happy confidence — though I suspect he doesn’t waste much time analyzing his characters’ deepest motivations, let alone plot developments that are more convenient than believable.

   Poets House, a national archive in Manhattan of 50,000 volumes of poetry, will host a celebration next Thursday evening of the life of Siv Cedering, a Swedish-born poet who spent much of her adult life on the East End.

    Poems by Ms. Cedering, who died five years ago at her farm in Sagaponack, appear in more than 200 anthologies, textbooks, and magazines. She wrote fiction as well — her first novel won the Best Book of the Year award in Sweden — and was also an accomplished artist and sculptor. Her books are part of the Poets House permanent library.

   Caroline Rob Zaleski will speak at the Amagansett Library on Saturday at 6 p.m. about her book “Long Island Modernism: 1930-1980.” Released by W.W. Norton on Monday, the book has been described as the “first illustrated history of Long Island’s modern architecture.”

    Based on a survey by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, the 336-page coffee-table book has essays on 25 architects and a comprehensive list of others, architects as well as designers, who have worked on the Island. It has 300 archival photographs, mainly in black and white.

“Yossarian Slept Here”
Erica Heller
Simon and Schuster, $25

“Just One Catch”
Tracy Daugherty
St. Martin’s Press, $35

“The Book of Obama”

Ted Rall

Seven Stories, $14.95

    If you are an adult and you write, or even if you don’t, Stony Brook South­ampton’s Florence Writers Workshop is a trip worth considering.

It’s a Book, It’s a Periodical . . .

    No, it’s the new Southampton Review, volume VI, number 2, summer 2012, 232 pages, retailing for 15 bucks and coming to you fresh and glossily printed courtesy of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.

 “At the Fights”

Edited by George Kimball

and John Schulian

Library of America, $19.95

   Boxing has inspired memorable prose from many gifted writers, and many of those writers have hailed from Long Island’s East End — George Plimpton, Budd Schulberg, Mike Lupica, Robert Lipsyte, A.J. Liebling, Wilfrid Sheed.

  “Killing the Messenger”

Thomas Peele

Crown, $26

   On Aug. 2, 2007, a 19-year-old male wielding a handheld shotgun killed the editor of The Oakland Post, a small, free, weekly newspaper in California. The killer had followed the orders given him by his 21-year-old employer, Yusuf Bey IV. Chauncey Bailey, his newspaper career tumbling in an avalanche of misfortune, seemed to be an unlikely target for murder, but he had written an unflattering story about an Oakland institution, Your Black Muslim Bakery.

    There have been several exhibitions and related events surrounding the 100th anniversary of Jackson Pollock’s birth in January. While not a cause for celebration, the anniversary of his storied death just passed on Saturday.