Book Markers 10.27.16

So How Beleaguered Is It?

The publishing business. How’s it faring in these constrained and digitized times? Well, a chance to ask someone in the know will present itself on Wednesday at 7 p.m., when John Knight, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, makes an appearance at Writers Speak on the Stony Brook Southampton campus for a chat, his interlocutor being Emily Smith Gilbert, the managing editor of The Southampton Review, the college’s literary journal. (And, lookee here, she’s The Star’s book reviewer this week.) 

Mr. Knight, formerly with McSweeney’s and The New York Times and who has written for New York magazine, will also address the craft of editing itself. The free talk happens in the Radio Lounge (once the studio of WLIU), upstairs in Chancellors Hall. A reception starts off the evening at 6:30. 

All Hallows’ Eve — the Readings

Long Island is haunted by many things — the vanished aeronautical manufacturing base and long-departed affordability come to mind. But what about the spectral kind of haunting, courtesy of the dead? 

Kerriann Flanagan Brosky is certainly a believer. You might even say she’s a documentarian of such phenomena — see her 2015 book on the subject, “Historic Haunts of Long Island: Ghosts and Legends From the Gold Coast to Montauk Point,” which she’ll talk about today at 11 a.m. at the Southampton Historical Museum’s Rogers Mansion. (Regarding her research, she conducted it with a medium and paranormal investigator by the name of Joe Giaquinto. Judge for yourselves, skeptics.)

Looking for a more fictional kind of ghost story? The lights will be dimmed and costumes donned at 5 on Saturday evening at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor for a reading of tales by that singularly spooked genius of American letters, Edgar Allan Poe, paired with a more contemporary strain by Val Schaffner, once a writer for The Star. The eight stories in his 2003 book, “The Astronomer’s House,” are in fact set in Sag Harbor, at least one involving a preservation-minded haunting of a historic structure — a specter we could cozy up to, for a change.