Books

   It’s almost that time again: sun hats and sunglasses, white linen donned by the yard, the inevitable chardonnay in clear plastic tumblers, and tumbling-down bons mots beneath the spreading limbs of an old Norway maple. In other words, Fridays at Five at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.

   James Joyce enthusiasts will commemorate the author’s life and his novel “Ulysses” on Saturday at a Bloomsday celebration at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. A “Joyce-inspired performance”  with Joyce portrayed by Mark Singer, an actor and vocalist, will be part of it.

    “Ulysses” follows the events of an ordinary day in the life of the fictional character Leopold Bloom in his home city of Dublin. The title refers to the hero of Homer’s “Odyssey,” and there are parallels between characters and events in both works.

“Mission to Paris”

Alan Furst

Random House, $27

“A New Yorker at Sea”

Nick Catalano

Aegean Press, $11

Drumm TV

    The Star’s Russell Drumm can be seen reading from his forthcoming novel, “A Rogue’s Yarn,” on LTV this week — specifically, tomorrow at 1 p.m., Saturday at 4:30 p.m., Sunday night at 10:30, Tuesday at 11 a.m., and on Friday, June 8, at 1 p.m. The novel, the story of an aging homeless surfer living in Waikiki with a dark secret, will be out first as an e-book this summer.

College Writing Awards

    College students. Might there be any reading this page? Well, you family relation out there, here’s something of interest to pass on: Suffolk Community College is sponsoring creative writing awards for college writers. They come with prize money and online publication for the winners in four categories: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and one-act play.

  “An Uncommon

Journey”

Deborah Strobin and Ilie Wacs

Barricade Books, $24.95

     Just as many people believe that the name of every victim of the Holocaust deserves to be remembered in perpetuity, so, too, it is held, the story of each survivor deserves to be told and heard. Both gestures are rooted in the dual needs to honor and to remember.

   Should you pick up the new Southampton Review expecting familiar contributors, you’d be right and wrong. First of all, who’s going to complain about opening a journal to more poems, four of them, by Billy Collins? That star of versification known for a peerless sense of humor is here contemplative — digging up an old toy truck in his backyard and thinking of the past, or pondering the oddity of the writing life.

   “The Man Who Wanted to Buy a Heart”

Leonard S. Bernstein

University of New Orleans Press, $18.95

Orion Award for Safina

    “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World” by Carl Safina won the 2012 Orion Book Award last week. The award recognizes “the book’s success in addressing the human relationship with the natural world in a fresh, thought-provoking, and engaging manner,” according to a release from Orion, an environmental, literary, and cultural magazine out of Great Barrington, Mass.

  “Long Island Noir”

Edited by Kaylie Jones

Akashic Books, $15.95

    What exactly is noir? The French film critics who coined the label for a particular string of ’50s hard-boiled American melodramas such as “Double Indemnity” described it as “oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel.” I also think noir, be it movie or story, needs to create a certain discomfort, an unease that doesn’t come with a straightforward thriller or whodunit.

“Long Island Noir”

    Forget the sunshine and beaches. You don’t have to sit in traffic or schlep through a dispiriting strip mall to know of Long Island’s dark side. And now its depths are plumbed in a more literary way in an anthology, “Long Island Noir,” edited by Kaylie Jones and out this week from Akashic Books.

“A Complicated

Marriage”

Janice Van Horne

Counterpoint, $26

   Clement Greenberg was one of the most significant — some would also say the most acerbic, bombastic, and pugilistic — art critics of the 20th century. He presided over the development of modernist art for some 40 years, championing American abstraction (he coined the term “Abstract Expressionism”), artistic taste and purity, formalism, and flatness in painting. He helped turn New York City into the capital of the art world, and he fueled America’s dominance in a global market.

    “Grand Isle,” Sarah Van Arsdale’s absorbing and suspenseful new novel, takes place in an eponymous North Fork enclave that closely resembles Shelter Island. A rather large cast of characters, most of them summer residents of Grand Isle, are introduced early on. It’s to Ms. Van Arsdale’s credit that they’re all clearly differentiated and pertinent to the tragedy at the heart of the story: an accidental death and its cover-up that create a ripple effect in the island’s close-knit community.

____

“Grand Isle”

Sarah Van Arsdale

“Eminent Outlaws”

Christopher Bram

Twelve, $27.99

   “Space Chronicles”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

W.W. Norton, $26.95

“Rome”

Robert Hughes

Knopf, $35

How does one tackle a subject as vast, complex, and full of bravado and drama as the history of the city of Rome? The answer, in the form of Robert Hughes’s “Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History,” is as an opinionated but erudite tour guide.

   “Balzac’s Omelette”

Anka Muhlstein

Other Press, $19.95

    While walking past the New Books table you see a small, square, butter-colored book with an irresistible title — “Balzac’s Omelette.” Don’t tell me you can pass by without picking it up for a look, even if it is just in mute tribute to the correct spelling of omelette.

“American Gibraltar”

Henry Osmers

Outskirts Press, $21.95

   Few would guess that the 11,000 acres of scrub oak and pine that we call Montauk can boast a history as complex as a small country’s. In “American Gibraltar: Montauk and the Wars of America,” which covers 300 years, Henry Osmers chronicles the regional repercussions of eight conflicts, from the Indian wars to the cold war years. Owing to its strategic location, Montauk has intersected with our war history and made one of its own.

 “An Available Man”

Hilma Wolitzer

Ballantine, $25  

   “The universe is offering you a gift. Claim it.” This is the urgent imperative put forward by a friendly psychic advising the skeptical and reluctant Edward, a widower and the protagonist of Hilma Wolitzer’s engaging new book, “An Available Man.” Edward, whose beloved wife, Bee, has recently died and left him lonely and bereft, ultimately struggles to find a way to claim the gift: a second chance in life, in love.

   Carl Safina will read from “The View From Lazy Point” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. for the Writers Speak series, sponsored by the M.F.A. program in writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton. The free event will take place in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

    Mr. Safina, a past MacArthur fellow, is president and co-founder of the Blue Ocean Institute in Cold Spring Harbor. His PBS series, “Saving the Ocean,” premiered last spring.

 “The View From

Lazy Point”

Carl Safina

Picador, $18

 “The Tender Hour

of Twilight”

Richard Seaver

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $35 

   No review can do justice to this incredibly rich memoir of publishing’s golden age — Paris in the ’50s and New York in the ’60s. At best what follows is just a sketch. You will really have to read Richard Seaver’s masterpiece for yourself. Buy “The Tender Hour of Twilight” at an independent bookstore, Canio’s or BookHampton — it is a celebration of the heyday of such stores long before the metastasis of the e-book, chains, and Amazon.com.

Actors — talented actors, that is — are usually amusing raconteurs and often good writers. They have a love of language, the sensuous savoring of the perfect phrase, and they develop a feeling for the dramatic arc of a scene, the timing of a punch line. So it is not surprising that Hal Holbrook, in his autobiography, “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain,” relates an arresting and vividly told life story, both personal and professional.

Right around the corner from our boys’ grade school,

they’d go there — first with us and then, older enough,

with their friends — for after-school treats, Everett’s

bushy mustache always smiling behind the counter.

Thirty-three years is a long time to know someone,

let alone a grocery store, and one could claim that

three generations of kids passed through his doors.

When Augie, our 12-year-old, told me about the sign

on the door he looked away, maybe from the idea itself —

    Here’s how it went: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was at a posh Bastille Day brunch at an oceanfront East Hampton home. A young woman, newly arrived on the East End, trying to make conversation over the smoked salmon tray, offered: “Oh, I’m from Indianapolis, too.” Whereupon Vonnegut, of the rumpled face and sweet, bovine eyes, said: “My mother committed suicide. She should have done it a lot earlier.”

“And So It Goes”

Charles J. Shields

Henry Holt, $30

Poets Pack a Gallery

    It’s billed as a Valentine’s Day reading of poems — but loosely. The day, Saturday, is after the fact, and the definition of a love poem has been expanded to include, for example, a love for the world.

Look Ahead, Writers

    February on eastern Long Island. It can seem like the calendar’s equivalent of 3 a.m., when nothing good happens, not even snow. But using the down time to plan for better days — how about July? — is Julie Sheehan, the director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton, who sends word of a boatload of writing workshops bound to set heads nodding in appreciation.

    Out this week in paperback, Helen Schulman’s “This Beautiful Life” is a highly contemporary tale of woe. The novel looks at how a family manages and fails to manage in the grip of a thoroughly distressing sticky wicket brought on by the ills of the exponential Internet and exacerbated by the ills of the family in question. The book is a peek at how individuals operate in society and within a family given ills all around — given life in this novel being something of a mess, it turns out, in spite of the luck, privilege, and striving of the characters.