An Island Life, Closely Observed“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.
Bullets and Bons Mots“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.
A Talk on Long Island’s Modern ArchitectureCaroline 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.
Long Island Books: When Dad Is a Famous Author“Yossarian Slept Here”
Erica Heller
Simon and Schuster, $25
“Just One Catch”
Tracy Daugherty
St. Martin’s Press, $35
Long Island Books: Talkin’ Revolution“The Book of Obama”
Ted Rall
Seven Stories, $14.95
Who Doesn’t Want to Go to Florence?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.
Poetry and Pugilism“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.
Long Island Books: Bad Business“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.
Pollock: Family and FriendsThere 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.
Long Island Books: Cornpone No More“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.
Means, Motive, and Opportunity“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.
Morning at the Gin Mill“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.
Long Island Books: The Great Contrarian“Masscult and Midcult”
Dwight Macdonald
New York Review Books, $16.95
Missing Jimmy“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.
ROUNDUP: From Parasites to PlotlessnessHas 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.
Long Island Books: Really Top Chef
“The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat”
Thomas McNamee
Free Press, $27
So how’s the East End market for literary readings? Strong? Steady? Saturated? Is the top-flight quality outpacing demand, or driven by it, and not just by the bursting supply of name authors here?
At a recent morning assembly at an elementary school not far west of the Shinnecock Canal, the guest reader, Jay Schneiderman, was introduced as a renaissance man, if not exactly in the following words: former East Hampton Town supervisor, legislator who finally broke the County Road 39 traffic logjam, vanquisher of that tough old pol George Guldi, drummer, and now, author and illustrator.
Long Island Books: Quiet Comfort, Rich Gossip“The Southampton
Cottages of Gin Lane”
Sally Spanburgh
History Press, $21.99
May King Van Rensselaer, in her quite brilliant book “The Social Ladder,” published in 1924, clearly states what the formula was behind the thoughts of those 19th-century colonists who planted their banknotes of conquest throughout the South Fork of Long Island.
Poetry Pops Up
Poets, prick up your ears: A new venue to air your verse has made itself available, open mike and all. On Tuesday starting at 5:30 p.m., Phao restaurant on Main Street in Sag Harbor will inaugurate Poets’ Prix Fixe with a couple of journal-published East End writers, Lucas Hunt and Michelle Whittaker, both of them associated with the M.F.A. program in Southampton. The organizer is Teri Kennedy, known for putting together shows of performance art and readings at Ashawagh Hall in Springs.
