Books

From Guild Hall’s new poet-in-residence, who will read a selection of her work Friday night at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Generous, encouraging, and nothing if not thorough, “Pity the Reader” is a kind of fiction writer’s chapbook, using the great satirist’s comments as a jumping-off point to address the budding writer’s most basic concerns.

“Selected Shorts,” the radio and stage show from Symphony Space, is coming to the Avram Theater at Stony Brook Southampton on Saturday to honor one of the college’s own, the late comic essayist David Rakoff.

Louis Begley wraps up his Jack Dana crime novel series in the most gruesome way imaginable.

In “Guestbook” Leanne Shapton tells stories composed solely of visual art or photographic images or prose, or an interplay of all three, inviting the reader to participate in rendering the unseen.

James Zirin prosecutes the case against Trump by picking apart a pattern of behavior — contentious real estate dealings, legendary unpaid debts, the unsuccessful casino gamble in Atlantic City, the Trump University fraud, and boorish misogyny.

When they became the new owners of Canio’s Books in 1999, Kathryn Szoka and Maryann Calendrille didn’t just buy a business; they bought into a community.

“Chicken Soup for the Soul” meets “The Twilight Zone” is the vibe in John McCaffrey’s new short volume of 11 brief stories.

Gary McAvoy’s ironically titled new book accuses Truman Capote of guilt by omission in the writing of “In Cold Blood,” and says the recently discovered notebooks of Harold Nye of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation contain smoking-gun evidence.

A master of audiobooks voice work will do what he does best — speak — about his craft and career at the library in Amagansett. Colson Whitehead, meanwhile, makes it onto another long-list for a top award.

Richard Panchyk has put together a kind of visual reference guide using Army Air Service photos from the 1920s to 1940, and Long Island, from Queens to Montauk, never looked better.

Alafair Burke, a talented author of domestic noir, is back with “The Better Sister,” exploring sibling rivalry and the dark underbelly of family life.

Paul McCartney, Amagansett resident and grandparent (and wasn’t he with some band once?), has just come out with his first picture book, “Hey Grandude,” while the McMullans return with a tale of two French bulldogs and Susan Verde brings a heart-restorative “I Am Love” for worried kids.

“The Great American Sports Page” has Mike Lupica on the brother of a football-playing fireman killed on 9/11, Robert Lipsyte on Dick Tiger, a boxer with a championship belt and a champion's conscience, and the timeless hyperbole of Grantland Rice.

John O’Malley’s “Urethane Revolution” is a surprisingly compelling and sometimes moving firsthand history of how the development of urethane wheels took skating to where it is today — a cultural phenomenon and, as of next summer, Olympic sport.

We’ll never tire of Elvis, and, when it comes to rock ’n’ roll, he represents the exponential leap from what was to what is, a point that is well made in Richard Zoglin’s “Elvis in Vegas,” which chronicles the King’s return to live performing from the self-imposed gulag of his B-movie-making period.

Michael Shnayerson’s “Boom” traces the growth of a burgeoning postwar art world and its expansion into the head-spinning mega-market it is today, fueled by insatiable collectors, resourceful, combative art dealers, and a shifting array of artists.

The 12 linked stories in Joel Mowdy’s debut collection offer a 1990s tour of young lives in a place not so very far from the Hamptons, but very far indeed psychically and economically.

From Lucas Hunt’s latest thematically linked collection of poems, “Hamptons,” published by Thane & Prose.

Clay Risen’s engaging “The Crowded Hour” tells the story of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, while focusing on the Spanish-American War as the turning point in America’s role in the larger world.

The East Hampton Library’s Authors Night benefit will convene once again at 555 Montauk Highway in Amagansett, with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, hobnobbing, and book signings starting at 5 p.m. on Saturday.

With “American Moonshot,” Douglas Brinkley has written a magisterial history of the space age and an affectionate valentine to those brave astronauts who flew to the moon, the politicians who dealt with the art of the possible, and above all to John F. Kennedy. He'll be at Authors Night in Amagansett on Aug. 10.

In “The Urethane Revolution,” John O'Malley tells “the greatest story never told in extreme sports history,” the 1975 birth of skateboarding, courtesy of a “hippy skunkworks of garages and shacks” in the Southern California sunshine. He'll read from it at a book launch at the Montauk Beach House on Friday, Aug. 9.

Ted Chiang, in his new collection of science-fiction stories, clearly enjoys imagining technological advances taken to the extreme, “Black Mirror” style, but you sense his ambivalence as he wonders what we're really doing to ourselves.

With “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead takes us deep into the Jim Crow-era South of the 1960s, in a novel based on the true story of a Florida reform school where wayward boys were trapped in a kind of hell on earth.

From "Mourning Songs," a poetry anthology just published by New Directions and edited by Grace Schulman. She will read new poems and excerpts from her recent memoir, "Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage," on Aug. 3 at 5 p.m. at the Amagansett Library.

The Fridays at Five author series at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton for July 19 brings Chris Babu with his dystopian Y.A. novel “The Initiation” and its sequel, “The Expedition.”

“Ballpark” is an architecture critic’s paean to the idiosyncrasies of old beauties like Fenway Park and the smart city-integrating design of new stadiums like Camden Yards. But hold the “concrete doughnuts,” please.

The East Hampton Historical Society's Poetry Marathon, held at the Mulford Farm on James Lane in the village, returns Sunday to continue a roughly 25-year tradition, with wine, comestibles, and signings.

It has been an open secret for some time that Howard Stern might be the best interviewer in America, humorous and agile. His new book, “Howard Stern Comes Again,” anthologizes the highlights of his radio career, from Paltrow to McCartney to Trump, complete with cross-references.