Books

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.

With his back to the dunes,

Harry reclines, his still-toned legs

Crossed at the ankles,

On a foot-rested beach chair,

Watching, on a laptop

Balanced on his hard-won abs,

An economist interviewed

On a book talk.

Offshore, roused by the wake

Of a shark-nosed hydroplane

Ferrying small-time gamblers,

Pockets and purses full of beads,

Texting their grandkids,

Whitman blows,

Melville breaches

And a jaeger robs a gull.

   The eighth annual Authors Night, a cocktail party and book signing to benefit the East Hampton Library, will take place on Saturday from 5 to 7:30 p.m. The authors reception will be followed by 25 dinner parties held at private houses in the area, each in honor of one of the guest authors, who will attend.

   Robert A. Caro, besides being perhaps the country’s pre-eminent biographer, is one of the main cogs in the fund-raising machine that is the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night, which, as is detailed elsewhere on this very page, happens Saturday.

   The Feminist Press, which is based at the City University of New York, is staging two cocktail parties on the South Fork this summer to introduce some of its recently published writers and to raise money.

“The Passage of Power”

Robert A. Caro

Knopf, $35

   Show me someone who thinks of history as the dry recitation of accumulated facts, and I’ll show you a person who has never known the pleasure of reading a book by Robert A. Caro.

“Vanished in the Dunes”

Allan Retzky

Oceanview Publishing, $25.95

   In this exquisitely neurotic tale of sex, murder, and guile, the author gives the East Hampton police investigator a special name, Detective Peter Wisdom. Detective Wisdom may be the most sensible character in the book, but for all his canny, down-home instincts, a disappearance and presumed murder goes unsolved for months.

August, I walk this shore in search of wholeness

among snapped razor clams and footless quahogs.

How easily my palm cradles a moon shell

coughed up on shore. I stroke the fragments

as, last night, I stroked your arm

smelling of salt, scrubbed clean by the sea air.

Once you loped near me. Now, in my mind’s eye,

your rubbery footsoles track sand hills

the shape of waves you no longer straddle.

You inch forward, step, comma, pause,

your silences the wordless rage of pain.

“All My Georgias”

    Living history will walk through the East Hampton Library’s heavy wooden door on Saturday when Redjeb Jordania of Springs arrives to read from his new memoir, “All My Georgias.” His father was the first president of Georgia. In 1921 his family and the entire government fled to France, where Mr. Jordania was born, to escape the Soviet occupation.

“Buried on Avenue B”

Peter de Jonge

Harper, $25.99

  “Shamelessly squeaking the tires, Wawrinka one-hands the Crown Vic through the tight turns of the basement garage.” That evocative little sentence might not be the one Peter de Jonge is most proud of in his new crime novel, “Buried on Avenue B,” but it does the neat trick of communicating fun in triplicate — for the reader, the writer, and the character behind the wheel.

“Masscult and Midcult”

Dwight Macdonald

New York Review Books, $16.95

“Ponies & Rainbows”

Sean Egan

BearManor Media, $32.95

    Buried somewhere in Sean Egan’s biography of James Kirkwood Jr. is an interesting book and an interesting man. Unfortunately the storyline is so smothered in irrelevant detail that it takes extraordinary patience to unearth them.

   Has a writer ever been more productive in death than Kurt Vonnegut? It’s a mini industry, from posthumous collections of his unpublished short fiction (“Look at the Birdie,” “While Mortals Sleep”) to the hefty Library of America volumes of his life’s work, the most recent of which, “Novels & Stories, 1950-1962,” came out in April. In October, Delacorte will release a book of his letters and Vanguard will publish “We Are What We Pretend to Be: First and Last Works.”

Furst Reads in Sag

    Ah, September in Paris — the bridges over the glittering Seine, the cafes, and, in Alan Furst’s latest novel of espionage, intrigue, and lust, the impending advance of Nazi tanks across the continent. It’s 1938 in “Mission to Paris,” and caught up in the machinations leading up to war are an Austro-Slovenian Hollywood actor, a German baroness, a Russian actress and spy, and for good measure a Hungarian diplomat or two.

“The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat”

Thomas McNamee

Free Press, $27