Books

After a successful career at the white-shoe law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton in Manhattan, Louis Begley took up fiction writing at the age of 57.

Robin Strong, the Montauk Library’s tireless archivist, could not have picked a better time to compile the photographic history of Montauk just published. Why? Because word has it Montauk has been “discovered.”

“It’s as hard as it looks, you gotta read ’em dumb books,” Loudon Wainwright sings in “Bein' a Dad,” one of his inimitable explorations of family life, “and you end up despising Walt Disney.”

As soon as “The Contender,” Michael Shnayerson’s biography of Andrew Cuomo, was released, I hurried to my neighborhood bookstore to buy a copy.

One of the most recent publications from the Southold Historical Society is “A World Unto Itself: The Remarkable History of Plum Island, New York” by Ruth Ann Bramson, Geoffrey K. Fleming, and Amy Kasuga Folk.

The story of this transformation is told through numerous photos and captions in a new book in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, “Bridgehampton’s Summer Colony,” by Julie B. Greene, the curator and archivist at the Bridgehampton Museum.

Lunch With Sheehy

Gail Sheehy’s recent autobiography, “Daring: My Passages,” explores her career in journalism at New York magazine in the go-go ’70s, her hugely popular 1976 book, “Passages,” and her relationship with Clay Felker, the influential editor. She will discuss all this and more as the guest of the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons at a lunch on Friday, April 24, from noon to 3 p.m. The setting is Cowfish, on the Shinnecock Canal in Hampton Bays, where three courses will be served and books will be available at a discounted price.

“The Players”

Jill Bialosky

Knopf, $26

Jill Bialosky’s “The Players” captures the essence of Americana in her baseball poems, in her descriptions of the beach, nature, small-town life, motherhood, and parents. Her true subject is the inevitability of loss, which includes children growing up and leaving, the death of a parent.

“The Innovators”

Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster, $35

The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.     — Muriel Rukeyser

Return of the Poetry Affair

National Poetry Month is upon us, and to mark it Rosalind Brenner, a Springs artist, has again organized a Poetry Affair at LTV Studios in Wainscott. This year’s brings 14 Long Island poets to read from their work starting at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 10.

“Deep Lane”

Mark Doty

W.W. Norton, $25.95

Mark Doty’s “Deep Lane” is a book about country, symbolized by gardens and animals, frequently Mr. Doty’s dog, Ned, who accompanies him on long walks, but also birds, deer, goats, sea lions, a mammoth, a white fish, and ticks that enter his Eden. “Deep Lane” is about city in poems that take place on New York’s streets, in bars, gyms, hospitals, and barbershops.

Jennifer Senft, an editor and English and writing instructor, is offering two workshops in April — the Art of Fiction, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, and one on nature writing at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridge­hampton.

“Spooky Action

at a Distance”

Howard Levy

CavanKerry Press, $16

Do the laws that govern the physical universe also govern human behavior? “Spooky Action at a Distance,” the title of Howard Levy’s new book of poems, was Einstein’s retort to physicists explaining quantum mechanics. In “The Age of Entanglement,” Louisa Gilder explains that Einstein scoffed at the idea that “Two particles that had once interacted could no matter how far apart remain entangled.” Think of identical twins claiming to feel each other’s pain even continents apart.

“Radical Descent” — Digitally

Linda Coleman’s memoir, “Radical Descent: The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary,” published by the Pushcart Press of Springs in the fall, is now out as an e-book for Kindle, Google Play, and similar formats.

Montauk at the St. Patrick’s Day parade: It’s not all beer cups and bagpipes. How about the history of the place?

For those interested in such, Carl Fisher, the visionary prewar developer most responsible for the shape the “Miami Beach of the North” was to take, is the subject of a brick-thick biography by Jerry M. Fisher, his grandnephew. “The Pacesetter,” first published in 1998, is just out in a new edition from the Friesen Press, a self-publishing concern out west.

Rebecca Alexander is a force to be reckoned with. At the writing of this memoir, she is in her early 20s. She is accomplished, vivacious, active, energetic, and derives a great deal of satisfaction from helping others. She has taught in a prison; she has volunteered for Project Open Hand, a nonprofit organization that delivers meals to people living with H.I.V./AIDS.

A Poetry Tete-a-Tete

“Baseball is portrayed in these radiant new poems by Jill Bialosky as a ‘fierce and feral’ rite of passage in which we’re all held hostage to the always surprising vicissitudes of time and change.” So says Philip Schultz, the East Hampton poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, in a blurb on the back of Ms. Bialosky’s new collection, “The Players,” thus hinting at a subject the two might take up in their conversation Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

“Art in America

1945-1970”

Edited by Jed Perl

The Library of America, $40

Fast-paced changes in the goals of American artists during the quarter-century following World War II were all passionately felt and widely debated, with many creative voices participating in the effort to define modernity.

“Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the

Small Presses”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $19.95

It is Pushcart Prize time again, and those who await the collection will do well to find a bookmark and a cozy spot. Pushcart editors have dipped into the independent and small magazines as a pool and come forth with a thick, healthy offering.

Let’s face it, the publishing game is a tough nut to crack — now more than ever, economically speaking. Thus the explosion in self-publishing and the potential interest in a panel charged with examining “What’s New in Self-Publishing and Small Presses,” which will convene on Wednesday at 7 p.m. as part of Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak series.

The Quotation Game

Spurred by a not very Long Island-like deep cold and unusual masses of snow — in short, a long winter indoors — your friendly neighborhood bookseller has started a diverting game, a “literary treasure hunt” called SmartyPants. Every day BookHampton will post a quotation on its website and Facebook page, and then the stabs at identification of both it and the book it’s from can begin.

“The Emotional Lives of Animals & Children”

William Crain

Turning Stone, $15.95

William Crain, a professor of psychology at the City College of New York, has written a controversial book, a clear polemic against mistreatment of animals. “If we believe we have a moral obligation to reduce suffering in the world, we must include animals,” he writes. “To ignore their suffering, and focus only on our own species, is self-serving and prejudicial.”

Deadline for Scribes

Hot, crowded July may seem far off, what with a winter for the ages upon us, but March 1 is not. That’s the scholarship deadline for this year’s Southampton Writers Conference, sponsored by the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton and running from July 8 to 19.

“Hope: Entertainer

of the Century”

Richard Zoglin

Simon and Schuster, $30

Fred Astaire, it was said, gave Class to Ginger Rogers and Ginger gave Fred Sex. Another song-and-dance man gave the whole nation Hope. And in return the nation gave its heart to Leslie Townes (Bob) Hope. Streets, schools, hospitals, and arts centers all across America are named after him, even a bridge (in Cleveland) and an airport (in Burbank, Calif).

“The Book of Love”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco Press, $22.99

Attention, lovers, hop out of bed! 

Valentine’s Day is upon you. Time to dig up a gift for your beloved, who will surely not be your beloved if you forget.

You have only a matter of hours to fix this. But in your haste why not skip the usual chocolates or flowers or Hallmark card (yawn) and spin over to Canio’s or BookHampton and pick up a copy (or more) of Roger Rosenblatt’s just published in the nick of time “The Book of Love.”

The children’s book team of Jim and Kate McMullan of Sag Harbor has branched out with a pilot for an Amazon Original Series that can be seen for free at the website of the retailer turned budding network. Episode one of “The Stinky & Dirty Show,” based on the McMullans’ “I Stink” and “I’m Dirty” books, is a 12-minute excursion into a Utah-like desert landscape a la Chuck Jones’s immortal Road Runner and Coyote cartoons for Warner Brothers, where, as then, towering rock formations figure in the plot.

Fifteen short stories by Al Burrelli, a frequent contributor to The Star who died in 2014, have been collected in “Nuggets: Short Story Treasures.” The volume was self-published by his wife, Louise Burrelli, who wrote a foreword to the book.

A retired public school teacher who turned to writing during the last five years of his life, Mr. Burrelli was awarded a literary prize for his first short story, “The Bride Wore Red,” and had a number of stories published by The Star over several years.

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?”

Alfredo Marcantonio, David Abbott, John O’Driscoll

Merrell, $65

Over 100 million people watched the Super Bowl. A recent survey found that 78 percent of viewers are more interested in watching the commercials than the game itself. Not surprising, then, that companies line up to pay the exorbitant fees to advertise during the game — $4.5 million for a 30-second commercial.

BookHampton Fights Back

BookHampton, the independent bookstore with shops on Main Street in East Hampton and Hampton Road in Southampton, is fighting the encroachment of online retailers like Amazon and a slow winter with a new service — free home delivery of books from Montauk to Hampton Bays.

“Polishing the Mirror”

Ram Dass and Rameshwar Das

Sounds True, $16.95