Books

A view from the ferry.

Barbara Lazear Ascher’s exquisitely crafted memoir describes a journey of love, pain, grief, and back again.

In her new novel, Eileen Obser clearly shows herself to be an authority on her subject: renting rooms to the young, self-absorbed, inconsiderate, conniving, and broke.

In the artist and critic Edith Schloss’s newly compiled memoir, the New York City of the Abstract Expressionist era explodes into a series of vivid canvases.

The professor and researcher Bill Schutt leads us on a journey through all things heart with a light hand and at times even humor.

The remarkable story of a Holocaust survivor who charmed and swaggered his way to financial heights, all the while maintaining a passion for Judaism.

It would be a mistake to think of this highly readable book as a Holocaust memoir. Rather it is a prominent American physician’s synthesis of some 80 years of a courageous life.

A poem for a warm autumn that has kept the roses blooming.

In “Light on Fire,” Gabrielle Selz traces the triumphs and tragedies of the California-born Sam Francis, whose luminous paintings and prints placed him firmly in the pantheon of 20th-century icons of modern art. 

Colson Whitehead’s penchant for exploring genres takes him to uptown Manhattan in the early 1960s and . . . a furniture salesman?

Julian Zelizer’s latest tells the story of a religious scholar who fought for human justice, befriending Martin Luther King Jr. along the way.

“All In” provides the most current, candid, and personal perspective of a figure of huge significance to women’s tennis and the women’s movement.

“The President’s Daughter” weaves a narrative of a terrorist’s kidnapping of a former president’s teenage daughter with several important themes: loyalty, family, kindness, duty, and faith.

Snapshot of an Iowa childhood.

Check out the Heyers’ new History Press volume for its illustrations and pithy folklore, just don’t expect much gore.

Millie Mosbach got out in time, in Ellen Feldman’s new World War II-era novel, so why would she return to the crime-ridden nightmare that was postwar Berlin?

A man and his dog . . .

The highly regarded novelist Hilma Wolitzer is out with a short-story collection that frankly and winningly addresses themes of sexuality and domesticity.

A new poem by a Springs man of letters addresses recent politics.

Surprisingly little ink has been spent on the personal friends presidents may rely on for savvy, unselfish counsel that can impact policy, the nation, and the world. Gary Ginsberg rectifies that with “First Friends.”

The East Hampton Library's Authors Night returns this weekend, celebrating more than 30 authors with in-person and online talks.

Simon Van Booy has drawn from the stories of one rural Kentucky family for his new book, and he repays them with an affecting, generous novel.

Blythe Grossberg chronicles her life as a tutor to the offspring of the ultra-rich who summer here, but the Harvard grad with a doctorate in psychology is no ordinary tutor. You’re left wondering why she put up with the parents.

In Laurie Gelman’s latest, Jen Dixon, spin-class leader and matchmaker, parent and power emailer, is back to face down her domestic and school fund-raising challenges with a sly wit.

Fathers and sons will relate to this harrowing literary memoir, but so will woodworkers, boatbuilders, and anyone who fled the rural heartland for an East Coast education. This is a writer to root for.

A new poem by Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning East Hampton poet.

These are unfinished, previously unpublished works of a prolific poet who was known for being “obscure,” but what they offer, thanks to Emily Skillings, the volume’s editor, is a far deeper understanding of John Ashbery’s process and what mattered to him as a writer.

Jeffrey Garten, an economist who served in four presidential administrations, argues that a single weekend at Camp David in August of 1971 was “a watershed in modern American history” and an indication of “changing American power and influence.”

Take them out to the ballgame . . .

Erica Abeel’s novel “The Commune” takes place in the summer of 1970, during the lead-up to the Women’s Strike for Equality, and recognizable literary figures abound as second-wave feminism comes in for some lumps.