Books

“Bolero”

Joanie McDonell

Thomas & Mercer, $14.95

   I’ve noticed that when reading mysteries I can usually tell from the opening chapter if I’m in for an enjoyable ride. With “Bolero,” Joanie McDonell’s first Nick Sayler adventure, I knew within a few paragraphs that I was in good hands. The tone is smart, the setup intriguing and fast-paced, and the protagonist appealingly eccentric.

    The life and achievements of David G. Rattray, a poet and translator who was born and grew up in East Hampton, will be celebrated in Manhattan next week with a day and evening of readings, film, and visual art on the 20th anniversary of his death.

    Mr. Rattray was the brother of Everett Rattray, the longtime editor and publisher of The East Hampton Star, and uncle to his son, David E. Rattray, the current editor.

Two Awards, Two Very Different Writers

“In the Land

of the Living”

Austin Ratner

Reagan Arthur Books, $25.99

   The follow-up to his award-winning debut, Austin Ratner’s second novel, “In the Land of the Living,” is the story of fathers and sons, stepfathers and surrogate fathers, brothers-in-arms and brothers estranged. It may be read as multiple bildungsromans; or as a tragic family saga of ambitious, fatherless men looking for acceptance in genteel — a k a gentile — America; or as a satire of manboys with congenital hemorrhoids.

    Ever feel that modernity has gotten so strange you must be living on another planet? In “The Twinning Project” (Clarion Books, $16.99), Robert Lipsyte of Shelter Island posits a second Earth created by alien scientists to study evolution. But humans, as humans will, have made a mess of things (our stock-in-trade: war, starvation, genocide, environmental degradation), and the project is being abandoned — no more Earths.

Caro Does It Again — and Again

    Robert A. Caro won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography last Thursday for “The Passage of Power,” the latest installment in his magisterial, multipart assessment, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” Two earlier books in the series have won the same award. This year’s ceremony was held at the New School in New York City.

“The Richest Woman

in America”

Janet Wallach

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $27.95

“Saul Steinberg:

A Biography”

Deirdre Bair

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $40

   Saul Steinberg’s sharply ironic drawings became so well known in the 20th century that the term “Steinbergian” was readily understood as a reference to a perceptive and piercing wit that stemmed from some slightly off-kilter way of looking at the world.

“Monsieur Proust’s

Library”

Anka Muhlstein

Other Press, $19.95

   Anthropologists have suggested that societies without writing have a linear sense of time, while in literate societies the sense of time is cumulative. It stands to reason, then, that the great novel of the last century, with its accumulative thrust and ruminations on the past, was also a book about, well, books.

   Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship knows that there is only one real secret to its success and that’s commitment. Mort Hamburg knows it too, and he has used the theme to anchor a new photo book profiling couples, famous and not, who have built long and flourishing lives together. And this is not his first rodeo.

“Cheating Justice”

Elizabeth Holtzman

and Cynthia L. Cooper

Beacon Press, $26.95

“Dead Anyway”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $28

    Meet Arthur Cathcart, a 42-year-old, 40-pounds-overweight freelance market researcher. He is the protagonist of Chris Knopf’s 10th novel, “Dead Anyway.” He describes himself as a “vigorous schlump” and “a Samurai of the Information Age,” though when we first encounter him, he seems more a samurai of snacking, noshing his way through several meals in the first few pages.

    Yes, spring seems far off. And yes, Major Jackson sounds like an important figure in the Battle of Antietam. Neither is the case, however, and both will converge Wednesday for the start of that season’s months-long series of readings and talks at Stony Brook Southampton. Writers Speak happens weekly at 7 p.m. upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

   Claire Reed will celebrate the Feminist Press’s publication of her new memoir, “Toughing It Out: From Silver Slippers to Combat Boots,” with a reading and discussion at the Bluestockings Bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan tomorrow from 7 to 9 p.m.

   Blanche Wiesen Cook of Springs, distinguished professor of history at John Jay College, will also participate, her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt in tow.

“Toughing It Out”

Claire Reed

Feminist Press, $18.95

   Privileged people “should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.”

“The Best American

Poetry 2012”

Edited by Mark Doty

Scribner Poetry, $16

“The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island”

John A. Strong

University of Oklahoma Press, $29.95

   The Unkechaug Indians live today on a small reservation along the northern bank of Poospatuck Creek in Brookhaven Township. Although less familiar than the Shinnecock and Montaukett peoples, the Unkechaugs’ history parallels what is known about the native inhabitants of eastern Long Island before contact with early Dutch and English settlers.

“A Wedding

in Great Neck”

Yona Zeldis McDonough

New American Library, $15

   Is it possible to change the deeply set attitudes of a family all in one day? Can grudges and ancient jealousies be forgotten in a stormy sea of events that culminate in one glorious wedding? Through the pages of “A Wedding in Great Neck,” a delightful novel written with humor and charm, Yona Zeldis McDonough provides the key to the transformation.

“Women in

Long Island’s Past”

Natalie A. Naylor

History Press, $19.99

   Natalie A. Naylor, a Hofstra University professor emerita, has assembled a useful and much-needed reference work on women’s history. Her focus in “Women in Long Island’s Past” is on Nassau and Suffolk Counties, where she found the public contributions of the “Eminent Ladies” and “Everyday Lives” of her book’s subtitle, as well as those of other women worthy of note.

    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).