Return of the Lit Lunch

There’s no shortage of writers in Sag Harbor, but there’s only one restaurant that can creditably claim to be the linchpin establishment that turned around what circa 1970 was a half-decrepit village — the American Hotel, which is where the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library will host this year’s fund-raising authors lunch at noon on Sunday.

The Harborite authors? James McMullan, the illustrator recently out with “Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood,” and Susan Scarf Merrell, whose new book, “Shirley: A Novel,” follows the ever-offbeat Shirley Jackson and her psychologically complicated year with a young grad school couple in Bennington, Vt., in the early 1960s. The lunch costs $50.

Brutality at a Beach House

Paul Batista, a trial lawyer, commentator on cable news shows, and expert on the anti-racketeering RICO statute, also happens to “write what he knows” — about crime and its prosecution. Case in point: his latest, “The Borzoi Killings,” which the, yes, Sag Harbor author has set in East Hampton, where, the story goes, one of the world’s richest men is murdered in his beach house. When a Mexican immigrant is the victim of a rush to judgment, it’s a trial attorney, Raquel Rematti, to the rescue.

But in the meantime, Mr. Batista will read from the thriller on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Hey, That Book Should Be a Movie!

Juliet Blake, a movie producer and summertime Amagansett resident, will give a primer on what — beyond sheer chutzpah — it takes to get a beloved book made into a feature film when she visits the BookHampton shop in East Hampton on Saturday. The title was Richard C. Morais’s “The Hundred-Foot Journey,” which Ms. Blake shopped around to Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, and Helen Mirren until the long-shot green light was given, with all three heavyweights involved in the production. She’ll tell the tale starting at 7 p.m.

“The Social Climber’s Bible”

Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson

Penguin, $20

John Updike insisted on writing his own jacket copy. A curious fact that can pop up when you least expect it. If you happen to be reading jacket copy.

The authors of “The Social Climber’s Bible,” Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson, use their new book’s back flap to set the tone for what’s inside: Ms. Johnson “is a graduate of Barnard College, manages her family estate,” yes, she’s of the Johnson & Johnson Johnsons, “serves as Master of Fox Hounds, and raises heritage turkeys.”

Furthermore, she “hopes that collaborating with her uncle, Dirk” — who reports inches above on the flap that he “summers on the wrong side of the tracks in East Hampton” — “does not get her kicked out of any of the clubs she belongs to.”

On the contrary, they’re here to help you get in. Sure, this is comedy that exposes what the authors call “our present-day culture’s final taboo,” but it’s also exhaustive, if arch, quasi-social science, almost 300 pages of it in a 5-by-7-inch format perfect for the top of the porcelain tank. There’s even a Wittenborn-Johnson Psychological Aptitude Test for Social Climbers. (Mr. Wittenborn’s father invented the Wittenborn psychiatric rating scale and was a noted expert and researcher in pharmacology, all explored in his son’s often satirical 2008 novel, “Pharmakon.”)

Of the 19 chapters, “How to Get More Out of a Cocktail Party Than a Hangover” is exemplary, offering tips separated out in shaded boxes for quick perusal: “Never walk directly to the bar,” or, “Never underestimate the value of kissing your hosts on all four of their cheeks.” Speaking of hosts, Mr. Wittenborn and Ms. Johnson point out, “never, never say, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ The graceful social climber always greets a stranger with: ‘So nice to see you again. . . .’ ”

“By giving the illusion that you have met before, you will be that much closer to actually having a genuine friendship.”

Each chapter is peppered with Empowering Thoughts, one elucidating “The Three Questions You Never Want to Ask at a Cocktail Party,” the third being “What do you do?” which, the authors point out, “really translates into ‘How much do you make?’ [and] is more tactfully handled by making a supposition: ‘Aren’t you in finance?’ ”

And like that.

If you’re of a certain age, “The Social Climber’s Bible” may well put you in mind of Stephen Potter’s midcentury “One-Upmanship,” a classic of the guide genre, with its driest of dry British wit.

Here, Mr. Wittenborn and Ms. Johnson employ no shortage of verbal feints, saying what they don’t mean, laying on amusing qualifiers: “We mention this,” they write of Ralph Lauren’s promotion of the WASP aesthetic, “not in any way to imply Ralph was obsessed with or fetishized the glamour of snobbery,” or, “If we were being mean we might . . . suggest corporate raider Ron Perelman was the inspiration for SpongeBob’s snobby neighbor, Squidward.”

Just one more. On the Middletons, “Did Kate and Pippa stop climbing when they were nicknamed the Wisteria Sisters in honor of that clingy, climbing, flowering vine? Of course not; they climbed faster.”

Good, catty fun. 

The first buck she has ever seen on her property

crosses her window view of the accumulated leaves.

She knows he is chasing a female just vanished.

He is carelessly intent, rolling his head and rack.

A few feet from her safe position at the sink, he

looks through the glass, staring at her stares.

Then he snuffles into the leaves and snorts,

lolling his great tongue to catch the doe’s scent.

He breathes in rapid gasps and turns away from

the prying glass, leaping, then running after

the expectation of release. When the woman parts

a glass wall to organize the leaves, she encounters

the sweet, strong musk which penetrates her

as a wildness in her lungs, orchids and camellias,

pressing on her breastbone; she rakes up the air.

Virginia Walker has just come out with a collection of poems, “Neuron Mirror,” the sales of which go to the Lustgarten Foundation’s research into a cure for pancreatic cancer. The book, written with Michael Walsh, is dedicated to, among others, three South Fork poets who died of the disease: Robert Long, who was an editor at The Star, Siv Cedering, and Antje Katcher. Ms. Walker teaches at Dowling and Suffolk Community College and lives on Shelter Island.

Helen Harrison will sign copies of her new book, “Jackson Pollock,” on Saturday at 11 a.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

The book is a primer on the artist with a concise background and a description of his art during various periods of his life. It is part of the Phaidon publishing house’s Focus series of monographs and is amply illustrated.

Ms. Harrison, who directs the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, is a former New York Times art critic and has written many exhibition catalogs and articles. Her previous books have included “Hamptons Bohemia” and “Such Desperate Joy.”

The book costs $22.95 and includes admission to the museum if purchased in advance of the event in person at the museum or at parrishart.org.

It’s not really fair, is it, to single out one writer as the highlight of a reading among putative equals, based solely on the whim of one faceless person at a keyboard. So anyway, Andre Dubus III will headline a reading from “Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the Small Presses,” which is out this week. The reading happens on Friday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. — a bit of advance notice, this, for your scheduling convenience. The place? The Strand bookstore on Broadway at East 12th Street in Manhattan. Admission is by way of the purchase of the featured anthology, which goes for $19.99, or a $15 Strand gift card.

Bill Henderson of Springs, Pushcart’s founder and editor, will handle the introductions. The evening is a collaboration with the Writers Studio, founded by the poet Philip Schultz, who lives in East Hampton.

Mr. Dubus is the author of “House of Sand and Fog,” the quintessential late-20th-century immigrants’ story, involving striving, prideful newcomers from Iran and down-and-out native-born Americans seemingly intent on squandering their lives and opportunities. Published in 1999, the novel was a National Book Award finalist. Mr. Dubus is also the author of a memoir, “Townie,” which casts his father, the late, great short-story writer Andre Dubus, in a not-so-flattering light.

The other readers are David Means, whose book of stories “Assorted Fire Events” was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Kim Addonizio, whose latest collection of poems is “The Palace of Illusions,” Michelle Seaton, a winner of a 2015 Pushcart Prize, and Jim White, a singer and songwriter on hand with his piece about David Byrne of Talking Heads fame.

“Cathedral”

Bill Henderson

Pushcart, $22

On a hill overlooking the sea, in Sedgwick, Me., Bill Henderson decided to build a cathedral. Though inspired by his visit to the Chartres Cathedral in France as a young man, this one would come out of his own imagination and spiritual journey; it would be borne of “my idea of holy.”

Mr. Henderson’s “Cathedral: An Illness and a Healing” tells the story of building this unusual structure, and also of his own kind of spirituality: There would be a lot of silence, the singing of hymns, unscripted prayers, using no single book. “This would be a cathedral of shut your mouth and listen.”

Choosing the rocks from the surrounding landscape was in itself a meditative process. He had no experience with such construction, but carried it out with no hurry with his daughter Holly and his constant canine companion, Lulu. The stones would be in honor or in memory of his saints — friends, neighbors, and family members whom we meet along the way.

The work was encumbered by persistent bad weather and other problems, and in the course of the project we see his searching for God, with its questioning, doubting, and probing. He wrestles with his “silent but devoted” Presbyterian upbringing, yet is always drawn back to an unadorned God of love, nature, simplicity, and wonder.

But in the middle of the project he is diagnosed with cancer, breast cancer at that, and it turns his life upside down. As it happened, he had a couple more cancer diagnoses over a few years, and even lost Lulu to a similar disease.

“I was caught between despair and the name of Jesus. That is all that remained of my faith. One word. No song. No hymn. A friend who had been to horror and back. Jesus.”

At one point during the “Cancer Years,” the style of writing changes abruptly from lyrical prose to very short and jagged incomplete sentences, with a brutal honesty. This is jarring and disconcerting, as it is meant to be, and it is a vivid, unvarnished account of his experience that many will relate to. Mr. Henderson says, “Journal entries recount the next years more precisely and more harshly than I can remember, for indeed many of those days I would like to forget, and have forgotten. A glowing prose would only create a gloss on the deep down horror.”

Eventually there is a healing, in the broad sense of the word — his own resurrection of sorts — and it takes place quietly and unexpectedly in a church in Springs that he intermittently attends.

Musing about atheists, he says what may be a good summary of his theology: “I don’t know enough about God to be an atheist.”

And yes, after standing incomplete and untouched for some time, the cathedral is finally finished, though in a somewhat downsized version of his original plan. It is a wonderful moment.

Mr. Henderson’s writing is beautiful, lyrical, and sometimes poetic. Before each chapter is a quote from the likes of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Chief Seattle, and Wendell Berry. The book has an appealing and easy-to-read layout, with short chapters, good use of white space, and expressive choices of type fonts that draw the reader in. There are a handful of small black-and-white photos, but if they were larger and clearer it would greatly enhance their overall effect.

In this inspiring spiritual memoir, Mr. Henderson gives us a lot to reflect on about life, death, love, relationships, small-town Maine, illness, despair, healing, and faith. It is moving and poignant, yet it is an easy read. Although I read the book in a fairly short time, I thought that I might like to reread a short chapter or two a day for reflection.

For those who are followers of Mr. Henderson’s, it is interesting that there is some overlap in timeline or subject matter between “Cathedral” and several of his other books: “Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction,” “All My Dogs: A Life,” and “Simple Gifts: One Man’s Search for Grace.”

Bill Henderson of Springs is founder of the Pushcart Press and editor of the Pushcart Prize.

All in the family, sort of, the Springs and Pushcart Press families: Linda Coleman, whose memoir, “Radical Descent,” is newly published by Pushcart, and Bill Henderson, the press’s founder, both of whom live in the hamlet, will join up for a two-for-one reading and book chat on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

Mr. Henderson will have new work on hand, too — “Cathedral: An Illness and a Healing.” Just out from W.W. Norton, it relays the experiences of “an aging man,” he writes, “who builds a holy place in his backyard. It involves bugs, lousy weather, cancer, and spiritual waverings.” In other words, it is in some ways a follow-up to two of his previous books, “Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction,” which detailed his building efforts on his property in Maine, and “Simple Gifts: One Man’s Search for Grace,” a personal look at great hymns of the Protestant tradition.

Ms. Coleman’s book, subtitled “The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary,” chronicles her troubled “descent” from a privileged background into the life of an early 1970s leftist radical, to the point of facilitating violence. Now an ordained Zen Buddhist monk, she has taught memoir writing to incarcerated women and works as a nurse.  

Here’s a cat story that won’t make you groan. First of all, Rupert, in Jules Feiffer’s latest book for children, “Rupert Can Dance” (Michael di Capua, $17.95), isn’t what you’d call cute, more like an orange Yoda on all fours. And he doesn’t just lie around, he’s got a passion for strutting and prancing while his owner, little Mandy, sleeps. He even uses her dancing shoes.

Then the interesting cat-human dynamic: “Rupert loved having a secret from Mandy. Cats love secrets and Rupert took great pride that his secret was one of the best ever.” When he’s found out, he hides, mortified, under a bed for three days.

“The fun in dancing was to do it his own way. In secret. And without having to take lessons.” Ah. What’s dancing without freedom?

But, no worries, Mandy uses her wits and diplomacy to come up with a mutually beneficial solution, and pet and owner pirouette the day away.

It’s been about 14 years since Mr. Feiffer, now an East Hamptoner, ended his decades-long run as a cartoonist for The Village Voice, where his outwardly happy dancer loosed a worried stream of political and social comment. Graphically speaking, it’s nice to see a return to form.

“The Adventures of Two

Black Bear Cubs”

Northern New Jersey must be one of the world’s great experiments in big game living cheek-by-jowl with humanity and all of its enticingly ripe refuse. Never mind the controversial bear hunts, Susan Kehoe, who owns a second home in East Hampton, headed out into the woods, camera in hand, capturing image after image for “The Adventures of Two Black Bear Cubs” (self-published, $16.95).

The book follows the cubs and their mother from springtime foraging through hibernation — with rare touches like an exhausted mama bear having fallen asleep so quickly she left her paw sticking out of the den — to the day when the growing cubs leave the den behind for good.     

There’s an awful lot of anthropomorphizing here, but kids will love the pictures of the adorable cubs rolling, wrestling, sleeping in branches, snuggling with their mother, and seemingly mugging for the camera.

“I’m Brave!”

Kate and Jim McMullan of Sag Harbor are back with a new installment, “I’m Brave!” (Balzer and Bray, $16.99), in their boyish series of picture books (“I’m Fast!,” “I’m Bad!,” “I’m Dirty!,” “I Stink!”). It stars a grinning red fire engine racing to an inferno at a faceless city warehouse.

He’s nothing if not enthusiastic about his job and every last accoutrement on his six-figure person (I guess the phrase “a whole lotta hose” couldn’t be avoided?). There’s even a matching game tucked into the story featuring the immortal Halligan and other tools of the trade.

These are big, bold images in watercolor and gouache by Mr. McMullan — every one of them a fold-spanning two pages. And while there’s water cannon action, it’s also a good nuts-and-bolts intro to the job of the firefighter, from details as small as the use of wheel chocks to the mundane cleanup afterward and the squeegeeing and repacking of those hoses.

Thinking Differently

David Flink, a founder of Eye to Eye, a national mentoring program, is not only an expert in learning disabilities, he has had his own struggles with them, specifically dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, he’s bringing all of that background to the East Hampton Library in a program for parents. Called “Thinking Differently: Reframing Learning for a New Generation,” it starts at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.

In his new book, “Thinking Differently: An Inspiring Guide for Parents of Children With Learning Disabilities,” he explains the difficulties and diagnoses, and offers strategies for how parents can be the best possible advocates for children. Building self-esteem and remaking the learning environment are also addressed.

Women Voters Host Sheehy

A lit lunch on the Shinnecock Canal? Not a bad afternoon. Cowfish restaurant in Hampton Bays will be the site of the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons’ fall author lunch on Friday, Nov. 14, from noon to 3 p.m., with Gail Sheehy discussing her new autobiography, “Daring: My Passages.” It details her work at New York magazine during its 1970s heyday, the splash she made with the hit book “Passages,” and her relationship with the influential magazine editor Clay Felker. Copies will be available for purchase and signing.

The lunch, including a three-course meal, costs $60. R.S.V.P.s are due by Monday, and checks made out to L.W.V. Hamptons can be sent to Gladys Remler at 180 Melody Court, Eastport 11941. The number to call with questions is 288-9021.

“Only You”

Eileen Obser

Oak Tree Press, $14.95

Eileen Obser, freelance writer, editor, and teacher, has written a book about sex.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, “Only You” is a memoir about her experience as a 1950s teen bride in Queens, unable to give her young husband, Billy, what he clearly wants and expects on their wedding night. And every night thereafter — daytimes too — though it’s not for her lack of trying.

She’s scared and he’s persistent. “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” he asks after his honeymoon advances fail to arouse her.

Worried that something is wrong with her, but intuiting that her mother would not be the one to ask — months before, she had told her young daughter that she was relieved her husband “doesn’t bother me anymore” and “finally leaves me alone” — she bears her burden silently, too humiliated even to share her secret with a beloved aunt.

Sometimes “trying,” other times putting Billy off with “later,” often faking sleep to avoid sex, always dreading the night, Ms. Obser finds herself with nowhere to turn.

Using song titles of the era as chapter headings, Ms. Obser evokes Lindy Hops, a candy store crowd, and good middle-class Catholic girls not “doing it” till they marry — marriage being a ticket out of her parents’ house, with their quarrels and constant bickering about money, of which there never seems to be enough.

A ticket out of one problem, maybe, but an express train to another — her handsome husband is possessive and could be crude and obnoxious. The intimacy she believes sex will bring eludes her.

Wondering if she would feel differently “with another guy,” she remembers Augie Vrondis, her “biggest teen crush,” and a dance contest they won.

“We moved dreamlike, possessed. Round and round, back and forth, swinging, swaying. Come close, get wrapped up in each other’s arms, soooo close, then separate. Do it again.” A joy in movement.

Her emotional pain and desire for more in her marriage made clear, Ms. Obser again recalls better times, and in one of the book’s livelier scenes — I often found the narrative lacked momentum, with sundry details about what characters said and wore slowing it down — she tracks back to her father, Albert Kirchner, previously drawn as humorless and stingy, now mimicking Edward R. Murrow interviewing a celebrity.

“It’s good to see you, Ed,” my father said, taking him to our bay window and pushing aside the limp, off-white curtains. “As you can see, we have quite a view from here,” and his hand swept . . . a view of the tops of more houses, a few trees, the railroad tracks and a cemetery to the left. . . . “This is a little something from our art collection,” he said, pointing to a faded, stained Currier & Ives print that had hung there for as long as I could remember.

. . . He kept it up, showing “Ed” all our family treasures — ashtrays, beer glasses, the inside of our coat closet, stains on the rug, until my mother, Buddy [her cousin], and I laughed so hard our stomachs ached.

A year and a half into her marriage and still a virgin, Ms. Obser takes matters into her own hands.

She consults with her priest. She sees a doctor, telling him of “the stomach spasms, dull aches and heartburn” that plague her when it’s time for bed. A simple surgical procedure solves the physical side of her problem. She can “do it.” But in an odd turn of events, now that she’s willing and able, Billy has other ideas. Annulment is what he’s thinking; he’s found someone else.

“Cast aside, rejected by [her] husband,” the ending of her marriage feels like “the death of all thoughts of love and happiness.” But Ms. Obser rallies. She gets a job, her own apartment, and takes college courses — she’d wanted to go to college for a long time, but Billy wouldn’t allow it, and she had “no idea how to even begin to accomplish such things.”

“In just a few years,” the ending paragraph tells the reader, Ms. Obser “would have a new man” in her life. One whom she would marry and with whom she would have children. I would have welcomed more about this new man, the circumstances under which they met, and how he differed from Billy.

Not skittish about discussing the complications in her early marriage, Ms. Obser takes on the dicey subject of sexual dysfunction — a word unknown at the time — in a forthright and honest manner, not blaming herself or Billy, but fixing the end of her marriage to the notion that the “kids,” as she calls the two of them, were “perhaps too young and ill-informed to make a marriage work.”

Rita Plush is the author of “Lily Steps Out,” a novel, and “Alterations,” a book of short stories. She lives in Queens and East Hampton.

Eileen Obser lives in East Hampton.