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.

“A Momentary Glory: Last Poems”

Harvey Shapiro

Wesleyan University Press, $24.95

Many years ago, Allen Planz said at one of his poetry readings at Canio’s Books that short poems were the most difficult to write. Too many poets, he said, seemed incapable of the compression and concision necessary to achieve success with short poems. Harvey Shapiro, apparently, has experienced no such trouble.

 In “A Momentary Glory: Last Poems,” published by Wesleyan University Press and edited by Shapiro’s literary executor, Norman Finkelstein, readers will notice the dexterity with which Shapiro shapes his short poems in this terrific collection of posthumous gleanings.

Most of these poems occupy a single page in this volume. Most of these poems are shorter than sonnets. Some of the longer poems, such as “Departures,” “Lines (3),” and “City Poem,” seem stitched together from shorter, fragmentary pieces that may have worked just as well individually.

These poems are so short that readers may wonder how they succeed at all. Shapiro’s poems eschew ornamentation. They lack, for the most part, figurative language. Robert Frost wrote that “Sound is the gold in the ore,” but readers will find none of that gold here. And, unlike that famous short poetic form haiku, Shapiro’s poems don’t focus on nature, per se, and they don’t march to a syllabic beat.

In fact, it may seem to readers that Shapiro has taken a monkish vow forswearing tropes, assonance, symbols, and objective correlatives, all the poetic armor of the ivory tower. Shapiro’s poems represent a refutation of Eliot’s high-minded rhetoric, of Stevens’s musical surrealism, of Frost’s insistence on traditional forms.

This is not to say, however, that Shapiro’s poems lack fundamental poetic qualities. On the contrary, what these poems evince is often missing from contemporary poetry — simple diction, clarity, and honesty.

“A Momentary Glory” makes clear Harvey Shapiro’s long affiliation with the Objectivist poets, whom he names in more than a few of these last poems. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Objectivism grew out of the imagism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and insists upon the use of the concrete for its inherent sensuousness and properties of individuality and uniqueness.

Shapiro makes no secret about his poetics. Many of the poems here concern poetry and Shapiro’s aesthetic position. For instance, “Poetics” makes clear Shapiro’s penchant for clarity:

In the argument over rhetoric

I am always for the lofty

but somehow wind up opting for the low.

Is that because Rezi speaks in me still

his Jewish moral concerns

which he wanted set down lucidly,

matter-of-factly,

with the lucidity, never prettiness

of Du Fu and Li Po.

“Rezi,” of course, is Charles Reznikoff, a leading Objectivist poet whose career spanned most of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, and who greatly influenced Shapiro’s work. Other Objectivists to whom Shapiro gives a shout-out in this collection include George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and Carl Rakosi. The allusion to Du Fu and Li Po is a nod to the pellucidity of Chinese poetry, to the virtues of brevity, compression, and clarity, tenets also of Objectivism.

Poetics aside, Shapiro’s poems also fascinate with quick cuts and juxtapositions. In “The People’s Poet,” for example, each of the poem’s four lines surprises because of their relationship to one another:

He was so pleased

with the poverty of his imagination.

It made him

brother to everyone.

One can’t quite imagine a poet pleased with an impoverished imagination, but here that very lack is an equalizer. This poem registers a profound recognition of poetry’s audience, that the dearth of, say, figurative language represents a democratization of poetry. The very prosaic qualities found in the Objectivists, including these last poems from Harvey Shapiro, close rather than widen the distance between poet and reader, suggesting that accessibility may be poetry’s finest virtue.

Other poems here work in this same brief and jarring manner. “The Old Jew,” “Nightpiece,” “Suburban Note,” and “George Oppen” spring an unexpected epiphany in the context of a few, otherwise innocuous, lines. Many of Shapiro’s poems hardly begin before they startle.

Shapiro achieves this with whatever subject is at hand. He writes about poets and poetry, World War II and his time in the service, aging and mortality, Jewishness, and memories of youthfulness and eroticism. This collection validates Shapiro’s reputation as an “earthy” poet, as in the first four lines of the book’s first poem, “The Old Man Has One Thought and Then Another”:

Let’s go out

And fart in the sunlight.

Let’s go to the playground

And check out the young mothers.

Or as in “Cynthia,” reprinted here in its entirety:

Reach in, she said,

and get some juice.

That was happiness.

For all this collection’s charms, readers may find some of the poems too brief and fragmentary. Some poems lack the quick epiphany or jarring juxtaposition that make the best poems here work. One example of just such a poem is “Florida”: “The sea beating / against the parking lots.”

A few other poems like this, mere postcards, appear here and there, but this book is worth a reader’s time and money. Don’t let the fact that this volume can be read — twice — in a couple of hours delude you into thinking you can write poems, too; Shapiro’s breezy offhandedness is the result of a lifetime of writing poems and of learning what to include and what to leave out, a skill few young poets today, no matter their aesthetic affiliations, seem to possess.

Harvey Shapiro’s poems, for the most part, attract and hold a reader’s attention because he has chiseled them down to their bare essentials, and each of the best shines radiantly, a momentary glory.

Dan Giancola is a professor of English at Suffolk Community College. His collections of poems include “Part Mirth, Part Murder” and “Data Error.”

The poetry of Harvey Shapiro, who divided his time between Brooklyn and East Hampton and died in January 2013 at the age of 88, will be celebrated with a group reading at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.

The Writers Speak series of readings returns to the Stony Brook Southampton campus Wednesday with Vijay Seshadri, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection “3 Sections.” Mr. Seshadri’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry magazine, and The New Yorker, as well as in four editions of The Best American Poetry anthology. He teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

The reading starts at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall, to be preceded at 6 by an open house held by the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.

The series also brings Nahid Rachlin and Elena Gorokhova on Oct. 8, Alissa Nutting on Oct. 22, Julia Fierro on Oct. 29, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya on Nov. 5, and, on Nov. 12, Brian Morton interviewed by the college’s Daniel Menaker, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker. Students in the M.F.A. program will read from their work on Dec. 3.

Reckless. What a name for a Mongol racehorse turned honorary U.S. Marine with two Purples Hearts, a Bronze Star, and an insatiable appetite for poker chips and beer. No way to treat a filly, you say . . . but then again, Reckless became a legend with a happy ending, no spoilers need apply.

“Reckless: The Racehorse Who Became a Marine Corps Hero” by Tom Clavin has it all: from an incessant repetition of nauseating-meets-devastating images of the Korean War to a Marine platoon with a leader who knows the worth of a horse in the entourage, one possessing a sixth sense for detecting an approaching enemy by the wafting scent of garlic and rice.

Reckless, the chestnut filly, weighed in at 900 pounds, measured a feminine 14 hands, dazzled in a fiery red coat highlighted with white stockings, and had racing genes that could have made her a champion.

Her Korean name was Ah-Chim-Hai (Flame-of-the-Morning), a star and a haiku in the making if ever there was one. But then another life in paradise was shattered by a call to duty that no horse, or any other being, would want to embrace.

War raged. Her soulful, poetic name was changed to Reckless, a tribute to the recoilless rifles that her platoon was armed with. Reckless had been drafted for $250.

Her first owner, Kim Huk Moon, had fallen in love with the filly’s mother, who died. He raised the filly reluctantly at first, but, overwhelmed by the loss of her dam, gave her up. Then, no more tears: The grown filly brought joy and renewal with her pronounced re-entrance.

“One morning, Kim arrived at Sinseul-dong and saw Flame — since she was the spitting image of her mother, everyone there simply called her that — in the center field of the track with several other young horses. Suddenly, she broke away from them at a gallop. To the young man, it seemed that his beloved Ah-Chim-Hai had come back to life, but with three instead of four stockings. Kim knew of the Buddhist teachings of reincarnation, and there could be no better evidence of it than the new Flame.”

In the course of fate, dharma, and destiny, however, an American Marine was thinking about a horse.

“The god of war had a sense of humor, all right. . . . Chinese troops fell like bowling pins. The slaughter became so senseless that even their usually merciless Communist commissars allowed them to retreat. . . .”

“It was that hot August night, as he idly heard the sounds of the fight still going on . . . that Pedersen [the second lieutenant in charge of the platoon] first had the idea of finding a horse. . . .”

“She was part stallion, but in every other respect she was a Mongol mare,” a breed “little changed from the time of Genghis Khan, whose hordes rode them to create by his death in 1227 the largest empire the world had known. . . .”

Reckless’s arrival at the camp was beyond welcome. She would learn to carry artillery and wounded men for miles. Her admirable spirit made her a Marine in her own right, while shrapnel wounds carved an imprint onto her weary being.

Any reader who isn’t bionic will fall in love with Reckless, her mythological dedication to duty on the front lines of battle, her playfulness, her historical breeding, and her soldiering on to the amazement of even the most jaded of human warriors.

Reckless adjusted to Marine life smoothly. Off-duty she wandered as she chose, slept near her fellow Marines, and shared their beer and breakfast. She learned to navigate holes in the ground where artillery had blown the landscape into a reminder that war raged on, and how to recognize barbed wire and communication wires and maneuver around them.

She played games with her trainers, dancing, and then pretended to be fierce when it was time to go off for her daily work lesson. A piece of candy persuaded her to get on with her day. Hoofing into a poker game, Reckless helped herself to a mouthful of poker chips, wondering what kind of candy they were.

Reckless became a co-Marine and a boost to the morale of her platoon. Pedersen “observed when some of the sergeants played poker . . . how their faces lit up when the horse’s name was mentioned. These tough Marines became kids again.”

White stockings aside, “Reckless” has all the markings of a horse story meant for the big screen.

—

A former summer resident of East Hampton, Amy Phillips Penn is the author of “Diosa: One Mare’s Odyssey on Planet Earth.” She is working on a book about Elaine’s, the legendary Manhattan restaurant, for Skyhorse Publishing, and writes a weekly column for NewYorkNatives.com.

Tom Clavin’s previous books include “The DiMaggios” and “That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas.” He lives in Sag Harbor.

“Daring: My Passages”

Gail Sheehy

William Morrow, $29.99

Just as I was finishing Gail Sheehy’s “Daring: My Passages,” I noticed the headline of a story on the New York Times business page: “After a Year Under Bezos, Last Graham to Leave Post.” Katharine Weymouth, the granddaughter of Katharine Graham, the longtime Washington Post publisher, was stepping down. Her departure would bring down the curtain on 80 years of the Graham family’s connection to the prestigious newspaper that reported Watergate.

I mention this not only because the event marks the end of a certain kind of family relationship to print journalism that Ms. Sheehy portrays vividly in her compelling “memoir,” but also because Katharine Graham figures prominently among the dynamic characters who populate her pages — along with Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Anwar Sadat, David Frost, Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Geraldine Ferraro, Edie Beale, Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Rupert Murdoch (hiss).

I could go on, but let’s get to Clay Felker, the innovative, obsessive, charismatic editor of New York magazine whom she falls in love with and weds after an on again, off again courtship that dates from Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency (they share their first kiss over the piece she’s written about Kennedy) to Mr. Felker’s proposal 16 years later. Their story doesn’t end there but threads its way through their marriage and Mr. Felker’s eventual poignant death from cancer.

If you are of a certain age and most likely of urban persuasion this book will resonate with you. Its familiarity captivates. You may have put the late ’60s and ’70s behind you, but Ms. Sheehy brings those days back again — a memory refresher so alive and abundant with detail you’ll live it again in a heartbeat. “Remember how avidly we read New York magazine?” a friend reminded me.

Remember Tom Wolfe’s article on “Radical Chic,” Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers? Recall “Click” by Jane O’Reilly — the moment of recognition when a woman becomes a feminist? How about the early days of “women’s lib,” the dinner party debates over gender roles, the birth of NOW, Betty Friedan’s National Organization of Women, the genesis of Ms. magazine (the first issue was an insert in New York magazine)? And there was the development of “New Journalism” — the art of telling a news story using the techniques of the fiction writer — dialogue, description, imagery, inner monologue. Under Mr. Felker New York magazine pioneered that writing style along with tantalizing graphics, political and social gossip, and thought-mongering articles designed to make you question your own lifestyle.

Gail Sheehy (the name Sheehy belonged to her first husband, a student in Rochester whom she supported through medical school) came to that maelstrom first as a reporter in the women’s department of The New York Herald Tribune. In what she describes as “the longest walk of her life,” she gathered up her nerve one day, left the female precincts (unheard of), and made her way through the male bastion of the newspaper (past Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin clacking away at their typewriters) to pitch a story on group houses on Fire Island to the editor of the Sunday supplement — Clay Felker.

Her boldness paid off — he not only took her story but ultimately took her on as a writer when he left the Tribune to start New York magazine. He also encouraged her to write “Love Sounds of a Wife.” Her first book, it detailed in disguised form the end of her marriage to her first husband, who had been unfaithful.

On her own, with a child, a little girl, she took only child support and made her way as a single mother.

She wrote for Cosmopolitan. She wrote for New York magazine. She wrote about culture and specifically about the culture of women and couples. Inspired by Margaret Mead, with whom she studied under a fellowship at Columbia, she wrote a series on the “Fractured Family,” “Bachelor Mothers,” and women who were choosing to be “Childless by Choice.” “Can Couples Survive?” she asked in another article. She wrote about prostitution, embedding herself in the life to do it. In hot pants and go-go boots she went out on the street and cultivated doormen and hookers. She wrote about Edie Beale and her mother and Grey Gardens in East Hampton, the derelict mansion where those relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived with an army of cats.

Ms. Sheehy’s breakthrough came of course with “Passages,” her exploration of the developmental channels that men and women must navigate on their way to personal change and growth. An assignment in 1972 to cover the women involved in the Irish civil rights movement took her to Northern Ireland, where one sunny afternoon after a peaceful demonstration she watched a young man alongside her have his head ripped apart by a bullet. That look into the face of death on “Bloody Sunday” sent her spiraling into a breakdown. She questioned her place in the world.

“Passages” came out of the upheaval. The book — offering readers a window into self-knowledge — was a wild success. It spent three years on the best-seller list and changed Ms. Sheehy’s life, establishing her as a celebrity author and making her a very rich woman.

“Daring: My Passages” is a big book — 460 pages, and that’s not counting the acknowledgments or the index. Some of the most moving writing is devoted to the romance with Mr. Felker. In his iconic essay about New York, E.B. White writes of the three New Yorks: the city of the native who is born here, the city of the commuter, and the city of the man or woman who comes from somewhere else “in quest of something.” Of these three, the greatest is the last, he tells us. For that city “accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.”

Clay Felker, from Webster Groves, Mo., was a banner citizen of the third city. He culled the essence of Manhattan and funneled it into New York magazine, a publication that at once spoke to its time, created a distinctly Manhattan persona, and predicted the direction in which the city was headed. Ms. Sheehy, when she fell for him, was an innocent, she tells us, living on the Lower East Side (he had an East 57th Street duplex), trying to catch up with each month’s bills, get her daughter to school, make her deadlines. Early on she sewed her own dresses.

Moving in with him and being his lover and his hostess was more than she could add to the mix. And Mr. Felker adored not only the city, but its women as well. She left — but not forever. Their connection endured, even as her career rose and his plummeted. She was with him through Rupert Murdoch’s devastating, and for Mr. Felker heartbreaking, takeover of New York magazine, and at his side when he died of cancer.

“Daring: My Passages” is billed as a memoir and by some lights I suppose you might call it that, though it would be more accurate to call it biography or history. Ms. Sheehy is an accomplished journalist, meticulous and often passionate. The book is a thorough remembrance of her life . . . her entire life. And she’s had a big life. Along the way she adopted a Cambodian refugee, collected a batch of awards, and rubbed elbows with heads of state. I’m betting that what she didn’t recall or record she researched.

But a true memoir is more minute in scope and explores an issue or question central to the writer’s existence. Often, though not always, it offers a kernel of insight or resolution, something the reader can take away — even if it’s only an image.

It might have been illuminating to understand the sources of Ms. Sheehy’s supersized ambition and tenacity, the persistent will that built her career. In this context I harkened back to an early chapter; whenever she lost a swim meet, her father made her pull off a switch from their forsythia bush and swatted her soundly across her legs.

As an adult there seems to be no problem she can’t solve with an action. During his final illness, with a feeding tube in his abdomen, she takes the depressed Mr. Felker to Paris and persuades a high-end bistro to puree a French meal, which she pours into him as she eats. At the end of his life, when she begins to drink heavily, she lands in A.A. and, after a few spills, sobers up.

This is a life that bursts with solutions. Therapists, psychologists, doctors, psychiatrists, dear friends, meditation experts, and A.A. at the ready to offer fixes. None of these resources take her to an inner life. The inner landscape isn’t where she’s traveling, but problem solvers like Ms. Sheehy lead exciting lives, lives worth reading about. I’d say go for it.

Phyllis Raphael, formerly of Amagansett, is the author of the memoir “Off the King’s Road: Lost and Found in London,” now available as an e-book from Roadswell Editions.

Gail Sheehy had a house in East Hampton for many years and now lives in Sag Harbor.

Secrets of Disney Animation

John Canemaker, who won a 2005 Oscar for his animated short “The Moon and the Son,” an imagined conversation with his father, will venture into “the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie Magic,” according to his new book’s subtitle, through one Herman Schultheis next Thursday at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.

The book’s title, “The Lost Notebook,” refers to a document kept by Schultheis, who worked for the Walt Disney Studio in the 1930s. Discovered in a forgotten drawer in 1990, it has been called “a covert scrapbook of special effects wizardry, capturing in photographs and text the dazzling, behind-the-scenes ingenuity of early Disney films.” Mr. Canemaker’s book explores its revelations as well as the complicated life of Schultheis, who walked into a Guatemalan jungle and was never heard from again.

Mr. Canemaker, an animation historian and professor at New York University, where he helped found the animation program, lives part time in Bridgehampton. His presentation starts at 7 p.m. In the meantime, he can be caught on Turner Classic Movies on Monday at 8 p.m., when he will co-host a showing of 10 animated films by the cartoonist Winsor McCay of “Little Nemo” fame.

For the Lit of It

Concerned about the future of small-fry literary journals and the fate of the indie bookstore? Funky Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor is offering a chance for you to put a $25 admission fee where your lit-loving mouth is Saturday with a fund-raiser twice over and a doubling up of poets reading. Rosalind Brenner and Pamela Kallimanis will read from their work starting at 5 p.m., the beneficiaries being Canio’s itself, naturally, and the Tupelo Press of North Adams, Mass., a nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

Ms. Brenner, who lives in Springs, is going so far as to take part in the press’s 30/30 Project and write 30 poems in 30 days. More about the project is at tupelopress.com. And, finally, an email promises “refreshments and fun” Saturday.

The Return of Obser

It’s become a tradition, hasn’t it? Eileen Obser, your friendly neighborhood writing coach over the last couple of decades, is back at it at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, offering a class in the crafting of memoirs and personal essays. It starts Tuesday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and runs for five consecutive Tuesdays until Nov. 4. All levels of ability will be welcomed, and the cost is $65. Sign-up is by phone with the library.

The East Hamptoner, no stranger to these pages with her own memoir and “Guestwords” pieces, also is recently out with a book, “Only You,” chronicling her young adulthood in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the then-more-charming borough of Queens.

“A Certain Summer”

Patricia Beard

Gallery Books, $16

When a few days of Indian summer appear on the East End this autumn, pick up Patricia Beard’s debut novel, “A Certain Summer,” pack a picnic, and enjoy an afternoon of quiet beach reading.

Both Ms. Beard’s novel and a beach day in early autumn evoke another era — a slower time, a period of different manners and relationships — and both bring the past to life in such a way that a different future seems possible. Equal parts novel of manners, historical fiction, and quiet examination of social mores, “A Certain Summer” weaves important questions about class, gender, trauma, and family through its seemingly simple narrative as artfully as an experienced hostess arranges the seating at a dinner table so that conversations flow among acquaintances as well as friends.

Set in 1948 on Wauregan, an imaginary summer colony on an island off Long Island, “A Certain Summer” offers all of the delights of a beach read — a suspenseful plot, an array of sympathetic characters, and a setting so lovingly rendered that readers may feel they have escaped to the beach even if they are on the Jitney or weathering a northeaster. Nosy readers (such as me) will probably question which of Long Island’s outer islands inspired the novel’s setting. Stumped, my best guess is that Wauregan is a mash-up of Fire Island (because of its proximity to New York City) and Shelter Island (because of its size and aesthetics).

Most of the book is told from the perspective of Helen, whose husband, Arthur, was reported missing amid his work as a spy in World War II. Helen and her son, Jack, still hope for Arthur’s return three years after the war has ended.

The plot revolves around the circumstances surrounding Arthur’s disappearance, especially in relationship to Helen’s status as a married woman whose husband is absent. Not quite a widow, Helen begins to feel desire for other men after seven years apart from her still-beloved husband. While much of the narrative reads like a romance, Ms. Beard bucks the conventions of “they lived happily every after” by multiplying the possibilities available to our heroine and by situating her story in a context that clearly depicts the difficulties of married life as well as the advantages women gained during the war, when they exercised autonomy, freedom, and confidence.

“A Certain Summer” also questions conventions of masculinity, most overtly in its representations of the effects of war on the male characters. Ms. Beard employs a 21st-century understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder yet remains true to the world of the mid-20th century. In this way, she allows readers to see the physical and emotional damage caused both by war and by a world that did not have a complete grasp of this damage.

Initially, I was troubled by the novel’s seemingly one-sided representation of postwar anti-Japanese sentiments, conveyed via the language used by some characters and via the recollections of Peter, one of Helen’s romantic interests, who spends the summer with his grandfather at Wauregan, having returned from service in Japan, where he experienced and witnessed torture. Eventually, Ms. Beard balances Peter’s memories of brutality with his commitment to a new aesthetic, one that he learned to admire in Japan.

Here, as in her depiction of gender roles, Ms. Beard demonstrates an astute sensitivity to cultural politics atypical of the genre of summer fiction: Peter is changed by the violence of Japanese soldiers, and yet his future hopes are rooted in his desire to bring a new “way of living” to the United States, a way of living that he learned about in Japan.

In many ways, the world that Ms. Beard conjures is an adult, albeit inverted, Neverland, where joy is rooted in adherence to rules and customs rather than their dismissal, as in J.M. Barrie’s classic. But Ms. Beard shows that even magical retreats like Wauregan are subject to the vicissitudes of the modern world. In the end, in fact, it seems that Wauregan’s magic prevails in its very ability to change in a way that stays true to its origins, or, even more precisely, that magic prevails as Wauregan learns it must change to stay true to its origins.

Stephanie Wade is assistant professor and director of writing at Unity College in Maine. She spends summers in East Hampton.

Patricia Beard’s previous books include “After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905.” She is a summertime resident of Fishers Island.

New Prize for Comic Fiction

Writers, you have until the end of the month to get your submissions in for the new Robert Reeves $1,000 Prize in Comic Fiction, courtesy of Stony Brook Southampton and judged by the college’s Daniel Menaker, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker. Stories of up to 5,000 words can be sent to The Southampton Review. The fee is $15.

“We won’t even try to tell you what we’re looking for,” a release said. “The comic impulse is so widely and variously expressed in fiction that it resists definition.”

In addition to a grand, the winner, announced by Jan. 15, will be hailed at the Manhattan launch of the Review’s spring 2015 issue, in which the winning story will appear. Others making the final cut may be published in the Review’s online version. The prize’s namesake, by the way, is the founder of the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at the college and the author of the comic novels “Doubting Thomas” and “Peeping Thomas.”

Gail Sheehy at BookHampton

The new BookHampton shop on Hampton Road in Southampton — smaller, tighter, somehow more browser-friendly than the old Main Street one — is already worth a visit, never mind when a writer of some renown is cracking the spine of a new book inside. That’ll be the case on Sunday at 2 p.m., when Gail Sheehy visits to read from “Daring: My Passages,” which traces her formative years, her famous work for New York magazine in the heyday of the 1970s and the publication of the best-selling “Passages,” and on up to later life and the difficulties of handling the death of her husband, the influential magazine editor Clay Felker.

Ms. Sheehy will also read at BookHampton’s Main Street, East Hampton, shop, on Saturday at 4 p.m.

And on a corrective note, Ms. Sheehy pointed out that in a Sept. 25 review of “Daring” in these pages it was inaccurately stated that she had a “lifelong” problem with alcohol. That problem surfaced only at the end of Mr. Felker’s life.

Victor Rugg’s “Everything Is”

Now for something completely different: a story of “what happens when an emissary from the bliss comes to earth to help save it from the greed and neglect of those who would exploit it.”

So says the jacket copy of Victor Rugg’s new self-published novel, “Everything Is,” which goes on to tout “an earthly conflict” that “rises to become an otherworldly experience that is in equal parts terrifying and enchant­ing.” This “head trip of a book” mixes Indiana Jones and Bernie Madoff.

Intrigued? You can find out more on Saturday starting at noon at the East Hampton Library, as Mr. Rugg, an East Hamptoner, photographer, founder of a graphics company, and former adjunct professor at L.I.U., reads from and discusses his work.

“Radical Descent”
Linda Coleman
Pushcart, $18

At first glance, Linda Coleman’s “Radical Descent: The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary” looks like another entry in a familiar genre: confessions of a late-1960s, early-1970s radical leftist.

You know the story. Twenty-something baby boomer out to change the world, right the wrongs, save the planet, end the (Vietnam) war, and emancipate the poor realizes that marching for peace won’t do the trick when the cops have more guns and are willing to use them and tear gas against you and your fellow hippies.

I’ve made the argument myself: Political and economic elites, people who have more power and money than the rest of us, 1-percenters in the parlance of the late, not so great, Occupy Wall Street movement, will never relinquish their prerogatives or their privileges or their cash just because we ask politely or because it’s the right thing to do. Theirs is a system, gangster capitalism, that is unspeakably violent, militaristic, and brutal in every way; it only stands to reason that adhering to strictly nonviolent tactics will not, cannot, and indeed never has worked in effecting radical, revolutionary change.

The kind of progress that Linda Coleman and her comrades in groups like the Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society sought was wholesale change on the scale — though not necessarily executed the same way or with the same desired results — of the uprisings that toppled the governments of France in 1793, Russia in 1917, and China in 1949. Under this radical vision, those who are rich will no longer be rich, those who are poor will no longer be poor, those who are in charge will no longer be in charge, those who are not in charge will be in charge.

Ms. Coleman is a member of the last American generation whose left included a significant number of activists who craved revolution, real revolution, and came to the conclusion that violence would be necessary in order to effect it.

Ms. Coleman’s political awakening, though percolating for years beforehand, occurs at a leftist bookstore in Portland, Me. “Every day that passes I learn more about the way power works in this country, what color you have to be, what sex, what class or religion to have a place at the table, the dining room table. Otherwise, you eat in the kitchen. You eat leftovers if you eat at all. Every day my commitment to become a revolutionary deepens.”

She decides to act. She joins an obscure revolutionary cell. Like many of her comrades, Ms. Coleman is bourgeois. And she feels guilty about it.

And weak. Referring to Che’s classic appeal to the revolutionary to love, “I thought about how there was something . . . lacking in me, something I had to change. To be revolutionary, I couldn’t just love, I had to let the hate in too.”

Much of “Radical Descent” is dedicated to Ms. Coleman’s failed attempts to mimic the hardened men with whom she falls in, a group of criminals who rob banks in the name of the revolution but in truth lead no movement, have no connection to the masses, and commit the most grievous sin someone who seeks to emancipate the human race can possibly commit: Rather than follow the people, they run off half cocked, doing whatever the hell they feel like while wrapping their crimes in the veneer of radical action.

When I read or watch accounts of small groups like the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction, I am usually frustrated by the absence of basic Marxist analysis at the time, or even now.

No one can jump-start a revolution. Revolutionary situations require a witches’ brew of state oppression, economic despair, and bourgeois sympathy triggered by self-interested frustration with their own inability to advance their station in society, among other factors. The fact that none of those basic conditions existed in the late 1960s or the early 1970s in the United States, when leftist radicals were robbing banks and hijacking planes and blowing up draft offices, ought to have been obvious to anyone who had cracked open a copy of anything by Mao or Lenin.

Anyway, didn’t any of these people ever look behind and see that nobody was following them? After the big S.D.S. split of 1968 and the failure of the uprisings at Columbia University and in Paris and Tokyo, the students who led those movements splintered off into the work force to become cogs in the corporate machine, buy cars, and finally buy houses in the suburbs where they settled to raise their families.

Demographic and political realities of the time, and the failure to assess them, were the real errors of the 1970s radical left. To Ms. Coleman, however, the mistakes were personal. Men in the movement abused and even raped women. The money from bank robberies and from her trust fund — her comrades kept asking for donations — vanished into who knows what. They were, well, jerks.

A book should be judged by the intent of its author, but this otherwise well-written book doesn’t seem to exist to deliver a coherent message. It’s a memoir, a window into a time and a movement, and about as brilliant a description of an idealistic young woman’s confusion as I’ve ever read. But there’s too much personal narrative, not enough politics — and I don’t care to re-enact anyone else’s confusion.

In the end, the feds nail Ms. Coleman. Threatened with prison unless she betrays her former comrades, she testifies against them. “I’d go to jail. For as long as it took. At least I would have a righteous foot to stand on when I got out, if I got out. Had I been alone, I’m certain that’s exactly what I would’ve done. But I wasn’t alone. I was newly married. And then I was pregnant, and that changed everything. . . . There was no choice left at all.”

Having not had cops up my ass, perhaps I shouldn’t judge Ms. Coleman’s caving. But that’s what leftists do: We judge. Ms. Coleman wrote that Nelson Rockefeller deserved to die for policies that sent countless young men and women to jail, and here I will write that Ms. Coleman lied when she said she had no choice. She made her choice, it was an active decision, and she ought not to back away from it. It makes her sound too much like the naive young girl who walked into that bookstore in Maine decades earlier — and if a narrative needs anything, even one by a radical naif, it needs character development.

Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist, columnist, and war correspondent. His books include “The Anti-American Manifesto” (2010) and, most recently, “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” He will appear at BookHampton in East Hampton on Oct. 26 at 11 a.m.

Linda Coleman lives in Springs. She will give a reading at the East Hampton Library on Oct. 18 at 1 p.m.

“Kill My Mother”

Jules Feiffer

Liveright Publishing, $27.95

As I eagerly devoured “Kill My Mother,” Jules Feiffer’s brilliantly funny, moving (both emotionally and visually), multilayered film noir homage, I kept thinking this graphic novel could easily transfer to the screen — as an animated film. Hell, it already is an animated film on paper.

Every page in “Kill My Mother” is alive with movement, or what animators call “extreme poses”; that is, storytelling facial and bodily expressions that visually communicate the narrative to an audience.

Mr. Feiffer’s well-known love of the elegant art of Fred Astaire shines throughout. His cartoon characters literally leap and dance off the page, as they continually run into and out of danger. Or a woman sings an improvised lullaby while lifting a boy into the air, twirling in multiple sequential poses reminiscent of the “modern dancer” often seen in Mr. Feiffer’s long-running Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice comic strip. Or a drunken over-the-hill private eye slugs a guy in the face with a pistol in a frozen apache dance moment.

The first appearance of a cocky boxer named Eddie Longo, also known as “The Dancing Master,” offers a veritable showcase of Feiffer “moves” — precise frame-by-frame fight poses resembling a beefcake pas de deux.

Mr. Feiffer knows the animation medium well; he won an Oscar in 1961 for the biting anti-authoritarian animated short “Munro.” In “Kill My Mother” he’s done all the hard groundwork for a future adaptation to a cartoon film. The story and dialogue (taut and gripping) are accompanied by expressionistic storyboards of sequential imagery filled with famed noir tropes and directorial touches.

The characters — all of them by turns menacing, seductive, driven, violent, vindictive, hard-boiled, pathetic — elicit from readers a sympathy or, at least, recognition of the human condition through Mr. Feiffer’s empathetic drawings. His loose draftsmanship may appear improvisational — and at one point in the creative process it no doubt was — but what ends up on the page is highly selective. Mr. Feiffer’s intelligent and artistic presentation hits all the emotional buttons of his characters. Mr. Feiffer obviously does thorough research and I assume creates many drawings in order to make the strongest graphic statements he can make, choices that are calculated to get an audience to respond emotionally.

The layout of the sepia-colored pages is extraordinarily cinematic in ways that Orson Welles might have approved (and maybe envied). The first chapter opening — two teens jitterbugging in a 1933 San Francisco apartment — is in the old square 1.33 screen aspect ratio, which Mr. Feiffer immediately breaks out of. Depending on the needs of the story, his geometric panels constantly change shape — stretching to Cinema­scope proportions, overlapping, blurring, and sometimes they disappear altogether, emulating spot-on uses of the close-up, camera pans, subjective shots, over-the-shoulder shots, subjective point of view, cross-dissolves, and so on.

The influence of Mr. Feiffer’s early mentor Will Eisner is surely felt (as is the lesser-known but brilliant innovator Harvey Kurtzman), but Mr. Feiffer goes further than any other graphic novelist in creatively melding his phenomenal success as a stage and screen writer and print and film artist.

The page layouts for a steamy jungle mise-en-scène on a war-torn Pacific island are particularly impressive. Five panel frames are placed within surrounding, suffocating dense vegetation — vines, roots, leaves, and palm fronds that spill over the panels and to the edge of the page. Mr. Feiffer’s visualization makes the reader feel as ensnared, claustrophobic, and panicked as the character desperately seeking escape from her tropical hell.

Animation is not a genre. It is a method of storytelling, as Brad Bird (director of “The Incredibles”) once said. It is a technique, a tool that can do western films, science fiction, horror, screwball comedies, and film noir and other genres. But in America, animated features are ghettoized in the children’s film category. Perhaps “Kill My Mother” will attract a brave producer who will use its sensibility, humor, sarcasm, murder, and sex to move U.S. animated features toward a new adult audience and a new entertainment level.

Meantime, buy Mr. Feiffer’s book. If you don’t, “. . . you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

John Canemaker is an Oscar-winning animation filmmaker, a tenured N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts professor of animation, and author of 12 books on animation history, including “The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis and the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie Magic.” He lives in New York and Bridgehampton.

Jules Feiffer lives in East Hampton.