The milkweed and butterfly weed in shades of pink, yellow, and orange have begun their dazzling annual two-month magic show at the Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden, between Clinton Academy and The East Hampton Star on Main Street.

    From the trilliums and other woodland plants of early spring to the asters, goldenrod, scarlet-streaked switch grass, and fragrant yellow witch hazel flowers in the autumn, there is color, texture, and interest in the garden for at least eight months of the year. But this small backyard town garden is at its flamboyant best at high summer.

    Calista Washburn created a native plant garden there in 1989 as a community project of the Garden Club of East Hampton, which cares for it. Previously it had been a daylily garden, until too much shade interfered with flowering.

    Shade from a venerable and greatly loved beech continued to be problematic, and when roots from the tree began encroaching on the foundation of Clinton Academy, the tree was removed.

    Thus in 2003, thanks to a generous gift from the Meehan family, the native plant garden was reconceptualized and replanted. Aside from creating a beautiful flowering oasis in the village, a primary goal was that it be low-maintenance.

    Mrs. Washburn passed the baton on to me at that time and I’ve led the team of volunteers for the last eight years.

    Within a year the garden had knit together, creating a colorful tapestry. The sunny central island with butterfly weed and milkweed and a rose and sumac at its high point, underplanted with glistening, graceful Carex montana, is the most successful section of the garden.

    I’ve learned a tremendous amount working on hands and knees with weeder and clippers in hand. Who would have thought that a single bouncing bet (or soapwort, Saponaria officinalis) could be so invasive that we would have to double-dig twice and essentially sift the soil to eliminate its roots? That’s what preoccupied us for nearly two weeks. The fact that bouncing bet is not even a native plant, but an escapee, probably brought from Europe by early settlers, made this unnecessary toil particularly irksome.

    But, it was an opportunity in disguise. Because of the upsurge in interest in native plants, nurserymen are selecting better forms and hybridizing new variants. Last week we finished replanting this sun-drenched area which will showcase some of these new plants: the only hardy verbena I’m aware of, V. canadensis Pink Pepper, a soft but clear yellow Coreopsis Full Moon, spicy scented Agastache Purple Haze, and purple prairie blazing star, Liatris pycnostachya.

    The bed has something of the look of a newborn chick, but the verbena and agastache are already flowering and the coreopsis and liatris will soon follow.

    Deer have been a horrific problem in the garden. They outright killed some of the shrubs and perennials and grazed others to the ground. Regular spraying helped to a degree, but didn’t solve the problem. More seriously, the deer slept in the garden, littering the ground with turds and perhaps leaving behind deer ticks, which could have infected us with Lyme disease. I became reluctant myself to work in the beds, so how could I ask others to do it?

    Fortunately the village was sympathetic and we received permission to install a nearly invisible deer fence around the rear three sides of the garden, and the Historical Society recreated the front gate. So far, so good. Some plants that I thought were gone, like the turtle head, Chelone lyonii, have come back. And we volunteers need have no fears about working in the garden.

    Unfortunately it has not proven to be low maintenance. To be fair, after the initial planting, the garden has required minimal watering.

    The trees and shrubs require regular, professional pruning. The lovely carex in the central island bed must be cut back every February or March, grueling and backbreaking work. It is so vigorous that it also must be edged and the grasses removed from the adjacent path.

    It has been surprising to me how many native plants are so vigorous that I think of them as invasive. Each seed of the milkweed and butterfly weed would germinate into a plant with a deep taproot that is nearly impossible to remove, so we carefully deadhead them before the seedheads mature.

    Don’t mention that adorable blue-eyed grass in my presence. I’ve come to loathe Joe-Pye weed, and that is not an exaggeration. Two species, Eupatorium rugosa and E. hyssopifolium, self-seed throughout the garden and unless you see and remove them when they are young, it is very difficult. The third species, E. fistulosum, has grown into a huge clump and I shudder to think of digging it up to separate and replant a piece.

    As I work in the garden and daydream about it, I’ve been seeking ways to reduce maintenance. Shrubs and dense weed-suppressing groundcovers are appealing. The creeping phlox P. stoloni­fera Watnong Purple, from my own garden, is spreading nicely and does a pretty good job of keeping out weeds, as does Chrysogonum virginianum, a contribution with yellow flowers from Mrs. Washburn. I have in mind a variety of groundcovers of varying textures and shades of green to weave a tapestry under and around the shrubs. 

    Thanks to a recent donation by her family in memory of Mimi Meehan, money is available for both the deer fence and new plants. I’m researching brightly colored and fragrant native azaleas that flower in July for some of the shady areas, a double-flowered oakleaf hydrangea for another, and perhaps a mass of an improved version of the Annabelle hydrangea for the entrance area.

    I love seeing the involuntary look of surprise and delight in their eyes when visitors strolling down Main Street step into the garden. What I hope they see is an idyllic spot. Sit on the teak bench on the lawn and feast on the showy mid-summer perennials, or rest on the stone bench in the shade at the rear for a moment of tranquillity and serenity.

    “What a beautiful garden,” I hope they think. “And the plants really are all natives? You don’t say!”

“Sing to It”

Amy Hempel

Scribner, $25

The newly published short-story volume “Sing to It” represents Amy Hem­pel’s sixth book of stories (including “The Collected Stories of Amy Hem­pel”); her work has been widely published in journals and magazines and frequently anthologized over the course of a decades-long career. Ms. Hempel has long inhabited the short-story form, and with the new volume she creates new room for herself there, building and defining fresh arenas out of the strange, the intense, the ethereal, the elliptical, the staggeringly concrete, and plenty of white space on the physical page. 

The first 14 pieces in “Sing to It” range in length, from half-page flash fictions and one and two-page short short stories to several longer works, though these are also compact. “The Orphan Lamb,” just four paragraphs in total, is an account of a revealing memory, the relationship between teller and listener complex and perhaps menacing. “Fort Bedd,” a page and a half, is the account of a darkened experience, the who and why obscure, and a reach toward breathing space.

Ms. Hempel is making artifact-like texts that need fear no spoiler: They cannot be easily summarized (see wide of the mark — or possibly too narrow — attempts above), and certainly not paraphrased. Their plots are tied to language so that it is impossible to comprehend them outside the thrall of Ms. Hempel’s meticulous choice of every single word. These micro and brief lengths are individually and collectively absorbing, challenging in their brevity. Prepare to connect the dots.

The standout here is “A Full-Service Shelter,” one of the several longer stories in the first half of the collection. This piece originally appeared in Tin House and was chosen for “The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII” (gratifying to those who appreciate local muscle). Here is a soulful ode to overnight volunteers at a city dog shelter, a song to the compassion and humanity, sacrifice (not regarded as such), and compulsion that steer and sustain those who do this work. 

The piece is built around a haunting refrain, “They knew me as one,” sometimes shifted to “They knew us as the ones” (the phrase is excised from a killer sentence — “They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose,” from Leonard Michaels’s 1975 hard-hitting litany of a short story “In the Fifties”). The refrain becomes a driving engine to the agonizing specificity, one expression after another, of what is known: the acts of kindness, fierce attachment, and sense of mission of the volunteers on behalf of the dogs, some of whom are slated to be killed by lethal injection. 

“They knew me as one who decoded the civic boast of a ‘full-service’ shelter, that it means the place kills animals, that the ‘full service’ offered is death.”

Ms. Hempel develops and sustains a sense of urgency around what it is to connect and to love. Every sentence says it all. Combined, they say that you can never cover everything, never do enough, and that we are all in it together. There’s mastery here.

The second half of the volume is occupied by “Cloudland,” a long story, almost a novella. This piece is put together in short, fragmentary sections, and unfolds in a seeking first-person narration. The fragmentary structure and feel of singular observation, along with a sense of both lurking and impending loss, offer reminiscence of Renata Adler’s experimental novel of voice “Speedboat” (1976), though Ms. Adler’s protagonist runs at a much higher burn than Ms. Hempel’s narrator, unnamed as in her other works. 

The reader finds the narrator of “Cloudland” working as a home health aide in Florida, having left her 20-year teaching career in New York: “I had gone off the tracks.” The facts and shape of her past and her present situation come out as she winds among memory and observation, her tone simultaneously engaged and detached. She asks interesting questions that turn into wise statements; she is articulate, points out ironies. She tells you all kinds of things but still seems mysterious.

“What if you are the last one standing when others have left the concert, the theater, the crime-addled city, the busted love affair? What if you look for a sign and a sign doesn’t come. Or a sign comes but you miss it. What if you have to make a decision on your own and it feels like a body blow, falling back on yourself.”

The evocative cover art for “Sing to It” is apt: the face of a woman in simplified profile, with the silhouette of a songbird settled to serve as the woman’s delicately lidded eye. A bird’s-eye view, yet observing from the home of the self.

Evan Harris is the author of “The Quit.” She lives in East Hampton.

Amy Hempel lives in Hampton Bays. She teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton, where she will read from her new book on Wednesday at 7 p.m.

It was once a reliable feature of a Montauk Highway drive through Water Mill: the hammerblow of animal stink as you passed John Bellini’s duck farm. Windows were frantically cranked skyward, hands flew to cover mouths, children groaned from the back seat. And then it was gone as you continued on into Bridgehampton, just as nearly the entire Long Island duck farm industry disappeared in our collective rearview mirror starting in the 1970s.

Water pollution complaints, government regs, and ever-present development pressures doomed the Bellini farm, and for that matter the rest of them, about 100 in all at the industry’s zenith, the 1940s, when they were producing six to eight million ducklings a year, Susan Van Scoy tells us in her new book, “The Big Duck and Eastern Long Island’s Duck Farming Industry,” the “eastern” in this case stretching west to Eastport and Center Moriches, where the biggest farms were. 

By 1974, the 27 that remained were still responsible for 70 percent of the country’s duckling supply. Today there’s just one left on the East End, the Corwin family’s Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue.

The book, part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, came out this week, and adding to the newness is a book launch on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the David W. Crohan Community Center on Route 24 in Flanders, sponsored by the Flanders Village Historical Society (the group runs an amply illustrated website well worth a click) and the Friends of the Big Duck, which will benefit from the author talk and signing with refreshments.

Ms. Van Scoy is a professor of art history at St. Joseph’s College in Patch­ogue, “specializing,” according to the back-jacket copy, “in the history of photography and site-specific art,” making her particularly well suited to the project at hand, as the book proceeds chronologically, one photo and caption at a time, from a 1920 shot of two scraggly “three-week-old Pekin ducklings” padding around the W.W. Lukert farm in Center Moriches up to a photo from last year showing the restored Victorian barn that houses the Long Island Duck Farm Exhibit at the site of the famous Big Duck in Flanders. 

That imperious 20-foot-tall creature of reinforced concrete, built in 1931, inhabits the last third or so of Ms. Van Scoy’s book, and among the eye-openers is the fact that it first roosted in an area called Upper Mills in Riverhead before being moved to Flanders five years later after the marketing boost it provided made Martin Maurer’s retail business a success. 

In some ways it’s surprising the duck survived all those decades when so much else was swept away. The so-named Big Duck Ranch was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008, the same year another establishment related to the vanished industry, John Duck Jr.’s restaurant in Southampton, was shuttered after “failing to bow to the trendy tastes of summer crowds.” 

Well put, Ms. Van Scoy.

“Lesser Lights”

Sandy McIntosh

Marsh Hawk Press, $15

With “Lesser Lights,” Sandy McIntosh continues his “Hamptons Apprenticeship” memoirs. Here we meet pugilistic novelists, an oversexed sculptor, and an impecunious painter, among others. Mr. McIntosh has crafted a collection of vignettes and a few longer pieces that focus our attention on a Hamptons barely recognizable today. With this collection’s longest piece, “Robert, in Twelve Episodes,” he also appears to challenge the notion of what constitutes the meaning of “memoir” today.

Most of “Lesser Lights” concerns itself with life on Long Island’s East End, including Southampton College, where Mr. McIntosh studied in the early 1970s. The vignettes — most of them brief but entertaining — evoke a time when artists and writers constituted a more visible part of the Hamptons’ year-round community, when it wasn’t unusual to see Willem de Kooning wavering down narrow roads on his bike in Springs or Jean Stafford in her housecoat and slippers at the end of her driveway checking her mail.

The book’s first piece is a hilarious recounting of the making of two small indie films, Norman Mailer’s “Maidstone” and an untitled short directed by the painter Ilya Bolotowsky, who also happened to be teaching Mr. McIntosh’s class of freshmen English at the college. In this piece, titled “Taking Reality Through Its Paces,” Mr. McIntosh vacillates between descriptions of both directors’ filmmaking and antics. 

We glimpse Mailer’s chaotic meetings at a long-gone restaurant longtime Star readers may recall, the Hilltop House, located somewhere between Noyac and Sag Harbor. Mailer’s stable of actors included Robert David Lion Gardiner, Alfonso Ossorio, Ultra Violet, Rip Torn, and D.A. Pennebaker. With such a motley cast, what could go wrong? But Bolotowsky’s crew included Mr. McIntosh, several Southampton coeds ready to disrobe at a moment’s notice, and an exhibitionistic sculptor friend. You get the gist. 

Both directors were intent on making “pure” films, which I believe meant on the cheap as well as unscripted. The effect of moving readers between the two projects is itself wonderfully cinematographic, and Mr. McIntosh shows us he’s had as much fun writing about this as he did living the adventure.

Other pieces are equally successful but briefer. We watch as Mr. McIntosh attempts to meet the English novelist P.G. Wodehouse, then living in Remsenburg, or Truman Capote reacting to Mr. McIntosh’s first book of poems blocking Capote’s own book in the window of Keene’s bookshop in Southampton. He imbues all these vignettes with subtle, often self-deprecatory humor. He appears to occasionally laugh at himself while also reveling in his good fortune to have been in the right place at the right time to hitch his wagon to this caravan of kooks and geniuses. We may be in the company of “lesser lights,” but we’re never sorry.

The collection’s final piece is “Robert, in Twelve Episodes.” I confess to having hoped this would concern itself with the sorely missed poet Robert Long (there is a fine take on the sorely missed poet Allen Planz), but this does not appear to be the case. Each of these episodes features the author’s classmate Robert, with whom Mr. McIntosh becomes friends while house-sitting Robert’s father’s house on East Hampton’s Springs-Fireplace Road. The piece recounts Robert’s various (mis)adventures, especially concerning amorous liaisons with women.

Robert is a comic figure. He would have fit in nicely with any of the casts shooting “pure” movies. Oddly, however, Mr. McIntosh disappears from these scenes. He turns into a narrator who asks a few well-timed questions or reacts with incredulity to what he hears. Some readers might miss the introspection often found in memoirs to balance out the retrospection. As a result, these episodes feel more like reportage — New Journalism style — than memoir. 

I had the feeling while reading them that they may at one time have been written for or appeared in Dan’s Papers. In an earlier vignette, in fact, “Hot and Cold Type: Working for Dan’s Papers,” Mr. McIntosh writes about trying to get published in the paper while working for Dan Rattiner, but always falling, somehow, just short. He writes that Mr. Rattiner’s advice for the author during his employment at the paper was “write something funny.”

“Robert, in Twelve Episodes” is funny. I’m just not sure I believe a word of it. Is Mr. McIntosh guilty of indulging in the specious memoir? Is there such a thing? When reading a memoir should readers expect truth? Does it even matter any longer in our post-postmodern age of blurred boundaries, gender fluidity, and alternate facts? Did Robert really claim to have fallen in love with half a girl’s head in a jar of formaldehyde? Was Robert really deserted by his wife soon after returning from their honeymoon?

I once asked the author John Sanford back in the last century about how, then in his mid-90s and still publishing memoirs, he could recall so clearly dialogue that had occurred 60 or 70 years previously. He wrote, “Not one conversation took place as written; all are written as they must’ve taken place. A date, a letter, a single remembered phrase . . . I’m not praising myself when I say that’s the creative act; it’s what any serious writer puts on the page, the product of nothing turned into something.”

Do you believe that?

I’ll bet Sandy McIntosh does. “Lesser Lights” is a charming memoir written from that place where art and fact commingle to produce a swift, rollicking read that feels like it must be right, parts of which read like trompe l’oeil. But you should read it, and decide for yourself.

Dan Giancola teaches English at Suffolk Community College. His collections of poems include “Songs From the Army of Working Stiffs” and “Part Mirth, Part Murder.”

Sandy McIntosh led the H.R. Hays Distinguished Poets series at Guild Hall from 1980 to 2000.

“Never a Lovely So Real”

Colin Asher

W.W. Norton, $39.95

A rogue. A thief. Vagabond. Bounder. Ex-con. Nelson Algren was also one of the most famous authors of the mid-20th century. He knew how to write magical, evocative prose about the down-and-outers because he and his parents were exactly that. Broke. Aimless. Without even headroom to dream, so desperate were their straits. 

He was born in Detroit, then when he was a toddler his family moved to Chicago. Algren’s father had a garage, which he eventually lost. His mother was a lemon-sucking fury. Somehow after an okay time in high school Algren made his way to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating in 1931 with a degree in journalism. 

It was the Great Depression. Still, he was surprised to learn that there were no jobs. Until finally, several states away, he found one. He worked for a week until he discovered he was going to be paid a nickel. But at least during those few days he had access to a typewriter. 

He would bum around the country, sneaking onto trains, Dumpster diving. At one point he began going to a Communist center where he was given access to a typewriter again and mentored by someone who truly nurtured him as a writer, and he began publishing some stories. Algren set out once more to find work, ending up in a tiny Texas town where he was a bit of a celebrity and a small college allowed him use of a typewriter. When he was leaving town, he visited the college office one last time and decided that the typewriter had to come with him. 

The police caught him several train stops along the way. He was sentenced to three years in prison. He was lucky it was cut back to five months.

Nelson Algren is now an obscure name in the canon. But in “Never a Lovely So Real,” the biographer Colin Asher has set out to explore the genesis, the inner workings of this complicated author who sold millions of copies of literary short stories and novels, deeply influencing dozens of writers, notably Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir. Algren was a writer who came from nowhere and kept lighting firecrackers until he had a fireworks of a career, then somehow fizzled out of the writing firmament.

But Mr. Asher’s task was to piece together the mysteries surrounding Algren’s career while debunking the rumors. Colleagues and critics indicated that Algren disappeared because of mental illness, writer’s block, heavy drinking, and, yes, perhaps his conviction. However, Mr. Asher makes a strong case for the fact that the obstacles Algren faced in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s arose from insidious actions on the part of the F.B.I. 

The novelist had been a Communist, although later he would admit that he didn’t quite understand what cause he had been supporting. Mr. Asher makes a case that Algren’s suicide attempt and mental health hospital stays arose from his inexplicable difficulties that might have been the result of federal meddling in his life. He was denied a U.S. passport several times.

Algren, who’d written several novels and short stories, including three that won O. Henry prizes, solidified his renown with his groundbreaking 1949 novel, “The Man With the Golden Arm,” recipient of the National Book Award. That was the very first National Book Award ever presented: 1950. In Algren’s novel, Frankie Machine is a gifted card dealer. He’s also an addict struggling to stay clean while the card sharks are hounding him and he is trying to care for his wife, who is in a wheelchair. 

Algren knew all these characters well — most likely having lived hard and harder himself through many of the same travails. The 1955 film directed by Otto Preminger starred Frank Sinatra, with Kim Novak as his lover. The film was a huge hit. Algren, displaying his usual quick-to-anger and long-to-boil temperament, wrote an entire treatise about everything that had gone wrong in the translation from the page to the screen.

The exceedingly apt title for this biography comes from Algren’s “Chicago: A City on the Make,” published the year after Algren received the National Book Award. He dwells on his love-hate relationship with the city and its grimy underworld, its hustlers, hoaxsters, and losers. “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” His prose poem to the city (he’d published many poems to critical acclaim) was written at the height of his cynicism with life, a decades-long attitude, but this book came out during the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare trials.

Some of the most satisfying aspects of Mr. Asher’s carefully researched and beautifully written biography stem from his presentation of Algren’s literary connection with Richard Wright. Although they would have a falling out, Wright was exceedingly grateful to Algren for his thoughtfulness regarding Wright’s groundbreaking novel, “Native Son.” 

And, of course, there’s the juicy part: Algren’s affair with Simone de Beauvoir. The two could barely speak the same language. Yet they connected on a deep level despite the fact that she was always in a relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. He took her to demimonde Chicago bars. She took him to Parisian literary salons. During the time she and Algren were together, she completed her extraordinary book “Second Sex.” He’s a character in four of her books.

But then there was a detonation. They never spoke again. She most likely burned his letters. Her epistles to him were pulled into a book after his death. 

In 1975 Algren decided to write about the boxer Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, then in a New Jersey prison for murder, and began interviewing the middleweight, who had been convicted twice. Algren decided he liked Paterson, N.J., where the triple homicide had taken place, enough that he sold most of his belongings in the Windy City and moved there.

He made good on his promise to write “The Other Carter,” a novel, and obtained a National Endowment for the Arts grant to keep working on it. His agent shopped it around for a year but was told no by every publisher in New York. Twenty years before, Algren was one of the biggest-selling fiction writers in America. Despite the fact that he’d written for every glossy magazine around — at rates per article much higher than his early novels had commanded — he couldn’t sell the manuscript. Nobody wants a book about a murderer who was convicted twice, Algren was told. 

Around Christmas 1979, Algren, who’d grown paunchy and lived with a bottle of booze at the ready, had a heart attack. He swore a couple of close friends who visited him in the hospital to secrecy about his health — he’d always been good at compartmentalizing. He soon went back to revising the Carter book. 

Shortly afterward, in May of 1980, Algren decided it was time to move again. He bought a map of Long Island and rented a cottage in Southampton. He’d never been to the East End before. When his landlady saw the movers drive up with boxes and boxes of books, she threw him out because she was convinced all of those books wouldn’t fit into her cottage. 

Algren, who was used to finding place after place to stay all his life, went to a pay phone and kept dialing until he reached the playwright Joe Pintauro. The next day Pintauro found him a summer apartment in Sag Harbor, then by August Algren moved into a house on Glover Street, near Upper Sag Harbor Cove, where he liked to swim. 

His German translator had contacted him, and his Carter novel was being published. Meanwhile, the literary crowd on the East End embraced him: Betty Friedan, Peter Matthiessen, Kurt Vonnegut, E.L. Doctorow, and John Irving. The often irascible Algren had asked Vonnegut to pick up an Award of Merit for the Novel. But when Donald Barthelme nominated him and Malcolm Cowley and Jacques Barzun seconded him for membership into the extraordinarily prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Algren changed his mind about snubbing arts organizations. 

The induction was to be held on May 20, 1981. On May 9 he would throw himself a victory party in Sag Harbor. On May 8, complaining of chest pains, he went to a doctor who recommended he check himself into the hospital. Instead Algren bought everything he needed for his party then took a bike ride through the village. Early the next morning, he went to his second floor bathroom and fell. Dead from a heart attack at 72. His broken watch face read: “6:05.” 

His last novel, about Hurricane Carter? Renamed “The Devil’s Stocking,” it was published in the United States in 1983. Posthumously. Carter was released on a writ of habeas corpus two years later.

Algren is buried in Sag Harbor’s Oakland Cemetery. Linda Ronstadt, Pete Hamill, Gloria Jones, and Kaylie Jones went to his funeral. Writers paying their respects to him at memorial services or otherwise acknowledging his power as a writer included such disparate figures as Studs Terkel, Cormac McCarthy, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others who spoke about the contradictory elements of a man who was also praised as warm and supportive. 

His agent, Candida Donadio, selected the epitaph on his grave marker: “The End Is Nothing / The Road Is All.”



Lou Ann Walker is the director of the Stony Brook Southampton and Manhattan M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature. She lives in Sag Harbor.

It’s spring, it’s National Poetry Month, it’s time for something different — something new, that is, at the South­ampton Cultural Center on Pond Lane. 

“It seemed to me that a poetry evening would be a good use of the space,” Bruce Levine, who has organized what he hopes will be a monthly series, said in an email last week. 

“Our goal for the evening is to create more of a ’50s coffeehouse feel, sitting in the round and having a semi-reading/discussion event, rather than a formal reading and open mike.” It starts at 7 p.m. tomorrow. “We hope everyone will participate by reading their works and sharing ideas together in an informal setting, thereby making it a homogeneous atmosphere.”

Mr. Levine is a poet, naturally, but a man of many other talents, as well: a musician and composer, a fiction writer, and a painter. He lives in Middle Island.

That “our” above refers to his partner, Jane Briganti, a poet who joined him in putting together the reading, which they will host. A second one is set for May 17. 

Below is a short seasonal poem by Ms. Briganti. 

“A Tree Waits for Spring”

Cold winds blow

Leaves drift on the ground

Birds abandon nests

Silence surrounds

Steadfast alone

Leaves bloom again

Birds return to sing

A tree waits for spring

“Oh, that’s just first draft stuff,” you may have heard as an explanation for clumsy writing left on the page — professionally, back in college, you name it. But why not get it right before someone else reads it?

The “art and craft of the redraft” is next up in the Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton, just back for the spring. On March 13 a panel of faculty members in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature will speak from experience, from the point of view of a poet (Cornelius Eady), a novelist (Paul Harding), a master of the short story (Amy Hempel), a pre-eminent essayist (Roger Rosenblatt), and a writer who has successfully negotiated both fiction and nonfiction (Susan Scarf Merrell). 

The moderator will be, hold the parentheses, Robert Reeves, a novelist and the college’s associate provost. The start time is 7 p.m., and the place to meet is not the usual Radio Lounge upstairs in Chancellors Hall, but rather the first-floor Duke Lecture Hall. It is free and open to all, as the fliers say.

There’s more to the spring lineup, of course, as March 27 brings Gary J. Whitehead, a poet, with Ms. Hempel returning on April 3, joined by Julia Slavin, a writer of short fiction. Sharon Dolin, a poet, and Chloe Caldwell, a fiction writer, will speak on April 24, and M.F.A. students will read from their work on May 1.

The gatherings start with a reception at 6:30. Questions and answers and book signings follow.

“Golden Child” 

Claire Adam

SJP for Hogarth, $26

With “Golden Child,” Claire Adam’s sensitive yet gripping debut novel, it is Sarah Jessica Parker who is proving to be the one with a bit of a Midas touch.

In 2016, Ms. Parker, the television and film star and producer, and longtime East End resident, became the editorial director of SJP for Hogarth, a literary imprint of Crown Publishing. Her first acquisition, “A Place for Us” by Fatima Farheen Mirza, was released in June 2018. Applauded by critics, it told an intelligent and beautiful story of a Muslim Indian-American family struggling to adjust in a new culture while coping with death, dating, and opioid addiction. 

In an interview, Ms. Parker said her goal was to champion “voices from far away, people who are different, people from other lands that seem as distant as can be and voices and cultures that are unfamiliar.”

And so, with “Golden Child,” the imprint’s second offering, we’re off to Trinidad. Not the touristy parts with all-inclusive resorts and infinity pools, but some rough-and-tumble rural spot a few hours away from the bustling capital, a neighborhood described as “all bush and bandits.”   

There, in a small brick house with cracking walls, Clyde Deyalsingh lives with his wife, Joy, and their 13-year-old twins, Peter and Paul. Clyde works long, exhausting shifts at a petroleum plant, returning home with “oil-smell” clinging to “his hair, his clothes, the creases of his joints.”

A Rottweiler and a couple of island pot hounds provide the family necessary security in a dangerous and corrupt Trinidadian landscape where robbers and kidnappers prey on the rich and poor alike. Even those who can afford electronic alarm systems cannot trust the men who install them. 

The Deyalsinghs are stretched financially; the boys must share a bed. Joy wants Clyde to make some home improvements but Clyde has another plan for whatever money is left over: to ensure that Peter, his golden child, will have a prosperous future away from Trinidad.  

Physically identical, the twins are opposites in character and intellect. Peter is special, an academic superstar, while Paul, who suffered complications during birth, is referred to as “retarded.” Peter aces his exams; Paul hates school because when he tries to read, the letters “look like ants crawling around on the page.” He daydreams during class about getting a job, buying hipster clothes and Ray-Bans, and providing his mother with “a big wad of cash.” 

Then one afternoon, Paul goes for a walk along the river and never returns.

Now Clyde has a sickening decision to make, one that no parent should ever have to face: How far is he willing to go to save the son who has caused him nothing but headaches?

The author, who grew up in Trinidad and now lives in London, offers a poignant and honest exploration of parenthood, familial obligations and betrayal, and violence in contemporary Trinidad. Through flashbacks, we get a vivid picture of the twins, quite literally separated at birth, and of the closeness of family and community in a land where people have so little. 

“The old women in saris — aunts, sisters, friends; there are so many of them that Clyde loses track of who’s who — arrive, with tiny baby clothes that they hold up to one another and squeal at. They bring big iron pots and jars of spices and install them in the kitchen. When Clyde comes back from the hospital with Joy and the babies, the house is spotless and the big iron pots are full of food: rice, roti, curry chicken, curry shrimp, alloo pies, green salads, macaroni pie.” 

Dialogue, too, is peppered with island cadences so spot-on one is instantly transported: “Lord oh Lord,” he says, “it’s hot for so, eh? I can’t wait for rainy season to come.”

But most masterful of all is the way in which Ms. Adam renders the parental anguish against a plot of exhilarating urgency. I was downright exhausted, wondering all the while what I would have done in Clyde’s position. And, by the shocking end, thanking my stars that I have only one child.

Ms. Parker joins a growing list of celebrities who have turned book imprints into something of a cottage industry. From Oprah to Lena Dunham, Johnny Depp, the rapper Stormzy, and even Derek Jeter, celebrities offer publishing houses inroads to their lucrative fan bases. But unlike other big names whose imprints serve as an extension of their brands — like Goop Press, Gwyneth Paltrow’s outlet for her health-and-wellness books — Ms. Parker has made it clear that she intends to focus on literary fiction.

“I have always loved to read for the same reason I love to act, which is that other people’s stories are more interesting to me than my own,” she wrote on her imprint’s website.

Sarah Jessica Parker lives part time in Amagansett.

Gary J. Whitehead just had one of his poems published in The New Yorker. "Pretend It Was Just the Wind," in which the speaker describes floodwaters gently raising the entire contents of his house, was in the Jan. 7 issue.  

Cause for celebration, no? How about a reading. Namely for the Writers Speak series on Wednesday at Stony Brook Southampton. He'll be there with his latest collection, also from January and sporting the telling title "Strange What Rises." Terrapin Books is the publisher.

The guy confounds, as a builder of crossword puzzles, and elucidates, as a teacher of English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey. He lives in the Hudson River Valley, maybe even in a flood zone.

If you haven't been, the Writers Speak gatherings start with a wine-and-cheese reception at 6:30 p.m. in Chancellors Hall, and the readings are at 7. A question-and-answer period and a chance to have books signed conclude up the evenings. Admission is free.

The series continues on April 3 with a master of the short story, Amy Hempel, who happens to be as well a newish hire in the college's M.F.A. program, and Julia Slavin, whose "The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club, and Other Stories" has recently been reissued.

“The Woman Inside”
E.G. Scott
Dutton, $27

At first blush, E.G. Scott’s new thriller, “The Woman Inside,” seems like the cynical publishing event of the season.  

It won’t take long for readers of the novel to discover that its title makes no particular sense, except as a way to conjure the success of other recent blockbusters such as “The Woman in the Window” and “The Woman in Cabin 10.” The name E.G. Scott is in fact a pseudonym for two writers, Elizabeth Keenan and Greg Wands, and is clearly designed to hearken the name A.J. Finn — itself a pseudonym for the “Woman in the Window” writer Daniel Mallory. And if “The Woman Inside” (keeping this all straight?) is written in the alternating voices of a toxic married couple, then that of course is the exact device Gillian Flynn employed in “Gone Girl,” the granddaddy blockbuster of them all.

For some readers, at least, “The Woman Inside” arrives with a bull’s-eye on its cover.

It is perhaps surprising then that in execution “The Woman Inside” is solidly entertaining and finds its own identity in spite of its crass publishing blandishments. The story concerns a married couple, Rebecca and Paul. Each is selfish, self-centered, and lies like a president — they must certainly qualify as two of the more unlikable characters in recent fiction. That is actually a compliment, as the kick of the novel is the nasty mano a mano of this shaky marriage gone rancid. (Readers looking for characters to “root for” can save their money; the novel boasts a very appealing dog named Duff, but the people are all morally noxious.)   

The milieu is upper-middle-class Long Island; Rebecca works for Big Pharma while Paul works in real estate. Life is prosperous, but has not always been so; Paul’s building company struggled after the economic meltdown, and Rebecca was left to hold down the fort. Stress and disappointment, we are told, drove the husband into the arms of another woman (I need to remember that one), while the wife became hooked on the prescription pills available at her job. 

One afternoon, after a bit of snooping, Rebecca discovers that Paul has a mistress. Furthermore, he has cleaned out the couple’s savings account meant for the dream house they were building in Cold Spring Harbor. Other items include notes that suggest Paul may want to kill his wife.  

But hey, Rebecca is no prize either. She’s been fired from her job but tells Paul nothing. Every morning she dresses up and pretends to head out to work, but instead spends her days hunting for pills to fulfill her habit. And, oh yes, she fell in love with Paul when she was his mistress during his first marriage.  

About a third of the way into the novel, she herself becomes a murderer.      

The novel is told mostly from these two perspectives, each partner giving us his or her version of events (neither seems particularly reliable) and confessing lies. This is Paul in his opening salvo: “My wife and I are different types of liars. It’s one of the interesting things you learn after nearly two decades of marriage. I tend to get creative with the details. She, on the other hand, selectively omits.”  

While some might scoff at the idea of a novel having two authors, here it is an asset, as each character in the couple employs a convincing first-person voice (one assumes that Ms. Keenan and Mr. Wands handled their duties with gender specificity, but that is unknown).  

The novel flashes forward and back in a time sequence that can sometimes be confusing. But things kick in when Paul’s former mistress, Sheila, goes all “Fatal Attraction” on him (think hammers instead of boiling rabbits). As the plot unfolds there is murder (naturally), mistaken identity, dead body switcheroos, and enough red herrings for a Passover dinner.  

The strength of “The Woman Inside” is that it has no particular social conscience — no soul at all, really — but rather is content to wallow in its own decadence. Oh, there is a halfhearted attempt to comment on the evils of Big Pharma, but it doesn’t find much traction here. In fact, these characters are so damaged it’s hard to imagine them coping without their pills. They’re basically drug-sodden, upper-crust trash, sober just long enough to have adulterous congress with their neighbors before running back to their medicine cabinets. 

The rich are not like you and me, Scott Fitzgerald once said. “The Woman Inside” suggests he was right. The rich — until they go to jail, OD, or get murdered — have a lot more fun. 

Greg Wands grew up in Sag Harbor.