Harding on the Long List
And so land further honors upon Paul Harding, the surprise winner of a 2010 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel "Tinkers," published by the small and indie Bellevue Literary Press. Now the East Setauket resident and director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton (and Manhattan, for that matter) has been longlisted for a National Book Award for his latest, "This Other Eden," from W.W. Norton.
Based in historical fact, the novel concerns the ill effects of progress and bigotry visited on the multiracial inhabitants of a small island off the coast of Maine in 1912. Writing in The Star earlier this year, Kurt Wenzel praised the "tour de force of descriptive power" at work and Mr. Harding's "gift for nature writing — which he employs with an almost holy reverence."
The National Book Foundation will announce winners on Nov. 15. In the days following, "This Other Eden" also made the cut for the final six in contention for England's Booker Prize, to be announced Nov. 26.
Surviving Suicide
How does a child recover from his mother's death, let alone one by suicide, and what's more when that child is the one who discovers her body?
This is Richard Brockman's story, which he'll relate Friday at 6 p.m. at Canio's Books in Sag Harbor as he reads from his memoir, "Life After Death," newly out from Arcade. The East Hampton resident did recover, while continually grappling with the past, going on to become an expert in genetics and a clinical professor at Columbia in the department of psychiatry.
Castan and Canio Read
Close reader of The Star, you're wondering what one of your favorite contributors, Fran Castan, has been up to? She hasn't stopped writing poetry, for one thing, which you can see for yourself with a couple of brief pleasure cruises by ferry to the North Fork, where at 1 p.m. Thursday she'll read in the Mattituck-Laurel Library's garden. That means new work as well as old, from her collections "The Widow's Quilt" and "Venice: City That Paints Itself." Ms. Castan, formerly of Springs, now lives in Greenport.
Joining her will be Canio Pavone, founder of funky Canio's Books, who will read from a memoir he's working on and his translations of the poems of Lalla Romano, an Italian writer who died in 2001.