Books

By Michael Walsh

In this beautifully wrought, rather romantic memoir, the renowned literary critic Morris Dickstein recounts the tale of a quintessential American journey. It is a story that begins in a loving, happy, but strictly monitored Orthodox Jewish household on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Bruce Buschel on the 2015 horse show

Geography matters. An author chooses to weave a tale of mayhem, suspense, and fear. What better setting than a remote hamlet, surrounded mostly by water, where there is a lot of open land and where it grows very dark at night?

With notable exceptions, most surf writing and storytelling has appealed exclusively to surfers. The sometimes kitschy insider stuff, the you-wish-you-here-but-you’re-not magazine articles, even the iconic “Endless Summer,” most of it is of limited interest beyond the growing tribe.

Surfing journalism and literature are pretty thin. But there are notable exceptions: A Patagonia-financed film, “The Fisherman’s Son,” is a powerful story of how surfing empowered a Chilean environmental crusader.

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It is a quintessentially New York novel (and shameless urban chauvinist that I am, I really mean a Manhattan novel in much the same way that Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” was a Manhattan movie). It is Jewish, intellectual, Upper West Side, arty, upper middle class, Hamptons-y, and deeply concerned with psychoanalysis.

Hunt & Light, a poetry publisher out of East Hampton and Brooklyn, is dedicated to advancing the work of young poets. On Saturday at 5 p.m., this will be manifested in the appearance of one Esther Mathieu at Harbor Books, the still-new shop on Main Street in Sag Harbor.

The assignment to review Arlene Alda’s “Just Kids From the Bronx: Telling It The Way It Was” left me a bit cranky. “Isn’t she a children’s book author?” I thought. After a quick look at her Wikipedia page, I was reminded that Ms. Alda is the author of 15 children’s books, many of them prize winners and one a best seller.

Our daughter had just turned 3 when we applied for admission to the nursery school of the Lycee Francais de New York. At the time, the Lycee occupied one of the Upper East Side’s most impressive buildings, a Beaux Arts mansion on East 72nd Street just off Fifth.

Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lives in East Hampton, will read from new work at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m. with Grace Schulman of Springs, poet and professor of English at Baruch College. “Aardvarks” previously appeared in Slate.

When my 25-year-old grandson Jascha — an Elon Musk admirer and entrepreneur himself (The Dream Lab) — visited us in East Hampton recently, he was completely engaged in reading Ashlee Vance’s smart biography (Ecco, $28.99). He hoped to see at least one Tesla, and then on his last day here, getting on the Ambassador bus to leave, he spotted two!

Poetry fans are in for a treat, as Grace Schulman and Kimiko Hahn are the next readers in this summer’s Poetry Marathon, held every Sunday at 5 p.m. at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett.

In “The End of the Rainy Season: Discovering My Family’s Hidden Past in Brazil,” Marian Lindberg explores questions that all children eventually ask: How reliable are our parents? How sound is their version of reality? Can I trust their stories about the past?

At 40 years old this year, it’s fair to say “Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses” has matured into a powerful voice in American literature.

Coming up: Authors Night and writing workshops at Art Barge.

Over the centuries, most scientists believed that nonhuman animals lacked thoughts and emotions. Scientists assumed that other species just automatically react to stimuli — unlike humans, who make plans and experience feelings such as sorrow and joy.

Carl Safina will speak twice in short order — first at the ever-funky, ever-indie Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor and then at the Authors After Hours series at the Amagansett Library.

Writing a history book about four centuries of Long Island’s East End is rather like squeezing 12 adult humans into the trunk of a Maserati — it is going to be a tight fit. Marilyn E. Weigold, a professor who teaches at Pace University in the department of economics, history, and political science, has chosen to let the blue waters of Peconic Bay form the matrix for an engrossing collage of folklore and facts that tells an abbreviated but well-curated episodic history of Long Island’s eastern forks.

To hail the release of the summer/fall issue of The Southampton Review, the Public Radio International program “Selected Shorts” will hit the campus of Stony Brook Southampton on July 18.

Sunday marks the return of the venerable Poetry Marathon in Amagansett. This year’s series of readings starts at 5 p.m. that day with Joanne Pilgrim, an associate editor at The Star, reading from her verse, accompanied by Jan Grossman, a past fiction and poetry reviewer for the Rockefeller Foundation who has had poems published in American Arts Quarterly, among other journals.

The popular Fridays at Five series is back at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton with authors coming to discuss their books every Friday from July 10 through Aug. 28.

It’s a scene that’s replayed itself a million times in Hollywood — the supplicant stealing a few seconds of the big shot’s time and attention with a pitch, a screenplay, or, one day in September of 1994, a nearly completed feature film on a clunky VHS tape.

A new book by two part-time South Fork residents is a shrewdly amusing screed that George Orwell, whom the authors acknowledge, might have written if he’d grown up amid the quick-witted irreverence of The Harvard Lampoon, as the co-authors did in their undergraduate days.

“I wanted to put the essence of my reader on the page . . . to move him out of his genteel, benign, suburban WASP landscape. I wanted to circumcise the sucker and transplant him from the Jazz Age from whence he came to the Age of Anxiety, from Babbittry and Dale Carnegie to Sigmund Freud. . . .”

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“Don’t park your car there, you jackass!” the recluse in the muumuu would call out from a window of her bungalow near Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, where the Walt Disney Studio used to be.

Phil Carlucci’s “Long Island Golf” is a pleasant outing for golfers, mere fans of the sport, and the history-minded, offering reminders of the way it used to be — “Sag Harbor’s current course dates to around 1915.

A blurb for Wendy Fairey’s new book might read as follows: “Bookmarked” is about a professor who remains endlessly passionate about her reading of English literature and who skillfully shows how her thoughtfully lived literary life is surprisingly the stuff of novels.