Sidling Up to Crabs“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?
Long Island Books: Truth and Fiction in Wartime“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.”
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).
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.
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”
Long Island Books: An Artist of Many Names and TalentsSo 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.
At Home in America“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.
Power and Presence“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.
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.
