Books

I must admit to some trepidation about reading and reviewing Roger Rosenblatt’s new novel. His wonderful memoir “Making Toast” — about the sudden death of his 38-year-old daughter and how he moved in with her family, along with his wife, to provide care and comfort — never crossed the line from tender sentiment to sentimentality.

In the prologue to his novel “Slapstick,” which he called “the closest I will ever come to writing autobiography,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “My longest experience with common decency surely has been with my older brother, my only brother, Bernard. . . . We were given very different sorts of minds at birth. Bernard could never be a writer. I could never be a scientist.”

Gritty stories to hard sci-fi: the year’s 10 best books.

Reading the novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Simon Van Booy’s own biography, one learns of the surprisingly disparate number of places where he has lived: rural Wales, Kentucky, Paris, Athens, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And he hung out in the Hamptons for a while. Perhaps there were more addresses. But why mention all of these locales? The reason is endemic to Mr. Van Booy’s thinking and to the actions of his characters.

Hold the hoarding, bring the purposeful mess. So says Durell Godfrey, thematically, artistically, literally, in her just-out “Color Me Cluttered: A Coloring Book to Transform Everyday Chaos Into Art” (Perigee, $15). Ms. Godfrey, an East Hampton illustrator and photographer once with Glamour magazine and now with The Star, will talk about her work and the book and sign copies of it tomorrow at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

It’s not easy criticizing a writer who gives independent bookstores a million bucks just because he likes them, and who a year later, out of the largesse of his one-man bailout program, doubles down and offers to pay their employees’ Christmas bonuses.

From “Neuron Mirror” by Virginia Walker and Michael Walsh.

In 1979, Lorraine Dusky, a journalist, published “Birthmark,” a memoir about relinquishing a child — her daughter — to adoption. The book detailed Ms. Dusky’s sense of loss, gave voice to a perspective not yet widely heard, and established Ms. Dusky’s role as a writer of adoption literature and figure in the adoption reform movement.

If you don’t happen to get enough reading in during your extensive Friday morning purgation following the Turkey Day indulgence, you could always visit a bookstore.

One useful framework for classifying the protagonists of mystery novels, as Agatha Christie’s devoted readers well know, is that there are Poirots and there are Marples.

Anthony Minardi has such an extensive résumé he needs a spreadsheet to keep track of it all, which he does across more than three pages at the back of his latest endeavor, “The Wetlands Field Guide,” just published through Xlibris.

The winter/spring issue of The Southampton Review celebrates two heavyweight novelists recently departed, James Salter of Bridgehampton and E.L. Doctorow of Sag Harbor.

Publishing is changing, we keep hearing. That gnashing of teeth? Our own molars as we try to suss out what’s true, what’s possible. What is the future?

When Morris Dickstein talks about “the art and challenges of memoir writing” at Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor on Sunday, the eminent culture critic and professor will more than know of what he speaks, he will be speaking from his own recent history and recent work — his well-received “Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education.”

When four teenagers killed a 13-year-old behind a Smithtown school by stuffing rocks down his throat it became a cautionary tale for kids like Matthew McGevna, who went on to fictionalize it into his debut novel in a tried-andtrue attempt to get at the crux of the matter through storytelling.

It’ll be big doings for the Pushcart Prize’s 40th anniversary and the official hailing of the release of the new Pushcart anthology, “Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses.”

Bernie Sanders, the Democratic-Socialist candidate for president who has a house on Lily Pond Lane here . . .

Even if you’re not a big fan of trends, fads, sweatpants, rolled mats tucked under the arm signaling hip and healthful purpose, gyms, alien Eastern religions, stretching-induced flatulence, cultural co-optation by whites, therapy of any kind, or sincerity generally, kids change everything, kids make it all right, kids doing yoga will bring a smile to your face, and so will “I Am Yoga” (Abrams, $14.95), a new children’s book about the practice by Susan Verde of East Hampton that hits all the right notes for today’s beleaguered young.

If women ruled the world, begins a contemporary theory, war would become a relic of the past — chiefly because women would never put anything as petty as dominance at the top of their governing agenda.

The compiler of this column doesn’t expect anyone to remember a tossed-off challenge in the Oct. 1 paper in which, vis-a-vis a bookstore appearance, he suggested there isn’t an architecture critic more eminent than Paul Goldberger, but should a reader come up with one, put it in the U.S. Mail, and a prize could await.

When the doorbell rings at 3:30 in the morning, Merryn, the beleaguered heroine of Kaylie Jones’s new novel, “The Anger Meridian,” thinks it is her husband, coming home too drunk to get the door open.

Books, Drinks, Authors

The John Jermain Memorial Library’s annual fund-raiser and capital campaign — there’s one heck of an ongoing expansion going on, if you haven’t noticed — is called One for the Books! This year’s will happen on Saturday and again on Oct. 17 at 15 residences across and around Sag Harbor in the form of 6 to 8 p.m. cocktail parties, each centered on a particular book with its author in attendance. Tickets cost $100.

“I liked it and I didn’t.” What better words to begin this review than Ernest Hemingway’s first words in his letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald after reading “Tender Is the Night,” Fitzgerald’s novel in which he muddled my grandparents, Sara and Gerald Murphy, with himself and Zelda.

This sixth book on East Hampton history edited by the late Tom Twomey is a worthy addition to a series that began with “Awakening the Past: The East Hampton 350th Anniversary Lecture Series, 1998.” Subsequent volumes reprinted writings by Henry Hedges and Jeannette Edwards Rattray, among others, with one book devoted to articles on Gardiner’s Island and Montauk. The six anthologies constitute an important part of Mr. Twomey’s significant legacy of preserving East Hampton history and making out-of-print accounts accessible.

Goldberger on Gehry

If you can name an architecture critic more eminent than Paul Goldberger, mail your entry to this paper’s venerable Main Street office and you could receive a Star baseball cap, depending on our whim.

By Bruce Buschel

Just imagine for a moment that you have the most useless job in the world: to set up a list of painful and impossible theses for literary critics to explore. The top of your torture list of prospective titles might read a lot like Joseph Tabbi’s new book, “Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis.”

Fall is here and the roads are clear. Maybe it’s time to take a straight midweek shot down the highway to the graduate school ghost of Southampton College, the geographical mouthful Stony Brook Southampton, to give a listen to two important American novelists, Jane Hamilton and Ann Packer, as they open the off-season’s Writers Speak series.

Walter Donway lives in East Hampton. “My House” is included in the “Long Island Sounds” poetry anthology for 2015, published by the North Sea Poetry Scene. Its release will be celebrated with a reading on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at Briarcliffe College’s Patchogue campus.

In “The Prize,” Jill Bialosky’s absorbing new novel, the focus is on an invented protagonist, Edward Darby, a dealer in contemporary art, a middleman devoted to the work he represents. Although the New York City gallery he runs, but doesn’t own, must turn a profit to survive, Edward’s commitment is more idealistic than materialistic.