Authors Series in Amagansett
The Amagansett Library has a packed literary summer planned with an Authors After Hours series that begins Saturday night with Gerard Doyle, an actor and narrator, and continues to mid-August.
Mr. Doyle, who is the performing arts teacher at the Ross Upper School in East Hampton, has recorded hundreds of audiobooks, including the “Inheritance” series by Christopher Paolini, “Sea of Trolls” by Nancy Farmer, and “The Looking Glass Wars” by Frank Beddor. He won an AudioFile Earphones Award for his first audiobook, “A Star Called Henry,” and has won myriad awards since then.
The series will continue on July 15 when Dava Sobel will speak about her book “The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.” The book describes the extraordinary women at the Harvard College Observatory who helped discover previously unknown information about stars through studying and analyzing “the glass universe,” half a million photographic plates.
The novelist Alan Furst will talk about “A Hero of France” on July 22. The story takes place in Paris in 1941, and follows Mathieu, a leader of the French resistance, through the war years in the Nazi-occupied city. Mathieu helps Allied bombers and fighters who have come down in France return to safe territory. Mr. Furst is acclaimed for his historical espionage thrillers.
On Aug. 5, Sheila Kohler will discuss her memoir “Once We Were Sisters.” The book chronicles her childhood and her sister Maxine’s, well-to-do white girls in apartheid South Africa. Maxine was killed when her husband, who had beaten her and their six children for years, drove off a road in Johannesburg, in what was perhaps more a murder than an accident. The memoir explores guilt, privilege, familial relationships, and death.
On Aug. 19, Jules Feiffer, the acclaimed cartoonist, will wrap up this summer’s Authors After Hours series, speaking about his 1993 children’s book “The Man in the Ceiling,” which was adapted into a musical recently seen at the Bay Street Theater. In the story, a boy named Jimmy has a problem. He wishes more than anything to be a famous cartoonist, but cannot draw a hand. Complicating matters are Jimmy’s father, who wants his son to be athletic rather than artistic, and Uncle Lester, who cannot seem to write a love song for the musicals he writes.