Books

With “The Helsinki Affair” Anna Pitoniak ventures into what John le Carré called the secret world, where spies can have lives even more hidden than those that come with their tradecraft — a potentially disastrous duality. 

Francis Levy talks his new story collection, “The Kafka Studies Department,” while Brooke Kroeger and David Alpern discuss her book “Undaunted” and women in the history of journalism.

Alice McDermott’s new novel gives us remarkably realistic characters while fleshing out the zeitgeist of the 1960s as experienced by American women expats in Vietnam.

This medical mystery broadens its concerns into an exploration of the intransigence and arrogance of the giant bureaucracy that is the U.S. Army.

How Kurt Vonnegut, acerbic citizen of Planet Earth, anticipated the current ecological crisis and the need to go green.

Alice Carriere, daughter of famous artist-and-actor parents, blows away the standard memoir fare with graphic accounts of self-abuse and a blitz of pharmaceuticals.

William J. Mann’s “Bogie & Bacall” plows into the star couple’s roughly decade and a half together — insightfully and exhaustively.

Mark Matousek will elucidate “Lessons From an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life” on Friday at The Church in Sag Harbor.

John Sargent’s memoir reveals an informed guide to modern publishing, and then some: from heading up Macmillan to fighting off Amazon.

Philip Schultz and Grace Schulman talk poets and poetry at Duck Creek, while A.M. Homes and Carl Bernstein hash out the political moment.

Paul Harding longlisted, Richard Brockman as survivor, Fran Castan and Canio Pavone read.

The 30 stories in Francis Levy’s “The Kafka Studies Department” add a lightly absurdist take on human psychology to the landscape of literary brevity.