Books

The M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton will welcome the poet Major Jackson for an online reading and talk on Oct. 28 at 7 p.m.

Alastair Gordon talks up the Barnes Coy architecture firm and interviews a principal, and Grace Schulman headlines a celebration of Turtle Point Press via Canio’s Books.

Bill Henderson’s “The Family Bible” is a collection of plainspoken, candid poems centering on his struggle with the fundamentalist, literalist religion of his childhood and youth, with its contradictions of a loving and angry God and stories of kindness and violence.

Chris Whipple’s “The Spymasters” fleshes out the triumphs, tragedies, and turf wars of national intelligence with a trove of new details and insights from an astounding cast of characters.

In “For Now,” a book-length essay in Yale’s “Why I Write” series, Eileen Myles enacts the very strategies identified as essential to the author’s poetics. The essay chronicles its own construction, so that we learn not only why Myles writes, but also how this particular piece of writing came to be. 

Betsy Carter’s new novel is an intergenerational tale of family pleasures and tensions in a small town. Sweet and warm, it’s nice to be in her world the way it’s nice to look through a bakery’s glass case.

“Paris Never Leaves You,” an extraordinary new novel by Ellen Feldman of East Hampton, cuts between Paris in 1944 during the late stages of the Nazi occupation and the New York City publishing world of 1954. 

The course of true love never did run smooth: Book lovers with devoted book clubs are doing everything in their power, even mastering new technology, to keep up with meetings in the age of coronavirus. What Zoom lacks in dimension, dimensional conversation makes up for.

In Dirk Wittenborn’s new thriller, “The Stone Girl,” the females are strong and resourceful. The males, well, they’re strong and resourceful, too, it’s just that a large proportion of them are forces for evil.

Blake Gopnik's 900-plus-page doorstop of a biography of Andy Warhol is both a daunting undertaking and a hard-to-put-down page-turner, fully capturing its subject in almost microscopic detail.

In “Burning Down the House,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor, makes a detailed and compelling case that it was the G.O.P. firebrand Newt Gingrich whose approach to politics on the congressional level most prefigured and paved the way for Donald Trump’s.

Sarah Maslin Nir's "Horse Crazy" is not exclusively about horses at all, but a thoughtful memoir that blends rich reportage with intimate stories of combating loneliness and navigating grief.