Books

 “The Tender Hour
of Twilight”
Richard Seaver
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $35 

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...

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,...

    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...

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...

 “And So It Goes”
Charles J. Shields
Henry Holt, $30

“Kurt Vonnegut:
Novels & Stories,
1963-1973...

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...

    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...

“Elizabeth and Hazel”
David Margolick
Yale University Press, $26