Books

“Fully Alive”

Timothy Shriver

Sarah Crichton Books, $27

Books are a central part of my holiday ritual — perusing the year-end “best of” lists, choosing just the right volume to give to each special person in my life, and then curling up on the sofa with those I’ve picked for me.

“Billy Joel”

Fred Schruers

Crown Archetype, $29

Well, is he? Ask yourself. We know he’s brilliant, his contribution to the great American pop songbook formidable, but that’s not what I’m asking. Is he cool? In 1980 the 14-year-old me attending Finley Junior High School in Huntington decided, rather rashly, that he wasn’t. I mean, right next to a Stones tongue and the Who boastfully displayed in Magic Marker on your blue canvas Mead notebook, did you have Billy Joel represented anywhere? My guess is you didn’t.

“Chance” by Kem Nunn

A strange and unique San Francisco noir that is by turns dark, thoughtful, and oddly funny. Kem Nunn, who is best known for his “surfer noir” trilogy, has broadened his palette here to include subtle satire. His hero, Eldon Chance, is a self-absorbed neuropsychiatrist, and the author puts him through the ringer. When a divorce forces the doctor to sell off a precious antique desk, he finds himself in the midst of a series of unhinged and violent characters.

I confess there were times when I wondered, especially in light of recent kidnappings and beheadings, whether Ted Rall might have been more than delusional regarding his safety and that of his fellow cartooning journalists. Cartooning journalists?

Return of the Lit Lunch

There’s no shortage of writers in Sag Harbor, but there’s only one restaurant that can creditably claim to be the linchpin establishment that turned around what circa 1970 was a half-decrepit village — the American Hotel, which is where the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library will host this year’s fund-raising authors lunch at noon on Sunday.

“The Social Climber’s Bible”

Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson

Penguin, $20

John Updike insisted on writing his own jacket copy. A curious fact that can pop up when you least expect it. If you happen to be reading jacket copy.

The first buck she has ever seen on her property

crosses her window view of the accumulated leaves.

She knows he is chasing a female just vanished.

He is carelessly intent, rolling his head and rack.

A few feet from her safe position at the sink, he

looks through the glass, staring at her stares.

Then he snuffles into the leaves and snorts,

lolling his great tongue to catch the doe’s scent.

He breathes in rapid gasps and turns away from

the prying glass, leaping, then running after

There are three new cookbooks out right now with local connections. Ina Garten, a k a the Barefoot Contessa, has come out with her ninth book, called “Make It Ahead.” The folks of Edible School Gardens have published the “Delicious Nutritious FoodBook,” compiled and written by Judiann Carmack-Fayyaz. And the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living have come out with “One Pot.”

Helen Harrison will sign copies of her new book, “Jackson Pollock,” on Saturday at 11 a.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

The book is a primer on the artist with a concise background and a description of his art during various periods of his life. It is part of the Phaidon publishing house’s Focus series of monographs and is amply illustrated.

“Cathedral”

Bill Henderson

Pushcart, $22

On a hill overlooking the sea, in Sedgwick, Me., Bill Henderson decided to build a cathedral. Though inspired by his visit to the Chartres Cathedral in France as a young man, this one would come out of his own imagination and spiritual journey; it would be borne of “my idea of holy.”

“Land Rush”

Gary Reiswig

Archway, $11.99

Gary Reiswig’s slim volume of four stories and two essays — one a memoir and the other family history — evokes the feel of growing up on a farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the middle part of the last century. The essays bracket the stories in “Land Rush,” and there is little tonal or thematic difference between them. All the pieces draw from the same familial well and the experience of farm and small-town life on the Great Plains.

It’s not really fair, is it, to single out one writer as the highlight of a reading among putative equals, based solely on the whim of one faceless person at a keyboard. So anyway, Andre Dubus III will headline a reading from “Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the Small Presses,” which is out this week. The reading happens on Friday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. — a bit of advance notice, this, for your scheduling convenience. The place? The Strand bookstore on Broadway at East 12th Street in Manhattan.

Thinking Differently

David Flink, a founder of Eye to Eye, a national mentoring program, is not only an expert in learning disabilities, he has had his own struggles with them, specifically dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, he’s bringing all of that background to the East Hampton Library in a program for parents. Called “Thinking Differently: Reframing Learning for a New Generation,” it starts at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.

“A Momentary Glory: Last Poems”

Harvey Shapiro

Wesleyan University Press, $24.95

Many years ago, Allen Planz said at one of his poetry readings at Canio’s Books that short poems were the most difficult to write. Too many poets, he said, seemed incapable of the compression and concision necessary to achieve success with short poems. Harvey Shapiro, apparently, has experienced no such trouble.

Here’s a cat story that won’t make you groan. First of all, Rupert, in Jules Feiffer’s latest book for children, “Rupert Can Dance” (Michael di Capua, $17.95), isn’t what you’d call cute, more like an orange Yoda on all fours. And he doesn’t just lie around, he’s got a passion for strutting and prancing while his owner, little Mandy, sleeps. He even uses her dancing shoes.

“Echoes of Heartsounds”

Martha Weinman Lear

Open Road, $9.99

Martha Weinman Lear’s new book, “Echoes of Heartsounds,” directly evokes her riveting, unsparing memoir “Heartsounds.” In the earlier work her husband, Hal, a beloved doctor, had a massive heart attack, followed by complications that led to his death at 57. The irony is not lost on Ms. Lear when, 30 years later, she has a coronary and ensuing infection and finds herself in the same hospital ward with the same attending physician.

“Only You”

Eileen Obser

Oak Tree Press, $14.95

Eileen Obser, freelance writer, editor, and teacher, has written a book about sex.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, “Only You” is a memoir about her experience as a 1950s teen bride in Queens, unable to give her young husband, Billy, what he clearly wants and expects on their wedding night. And every night thereafter — daytimes too — though it’s not for her lack of trying.

All in the family, sort of, the Springs and Pushcart Press families: Linda Coleman, whose memoir, “Radical Descent,” is newly published by Pushcart, and Bill Henderson, the press’s founder, both of whom live in the hamlet, will join up for a two-for-one reading and book chat on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

New Prize for Comic Fiction

Writers, you have until the end of the month to get your submissions in for the new Robert Reeves $1,000 Prize in Comic Fiction, courtesy of Stony Brook Southampton and judged by the college’s Daniel Menaker, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker. Stories of up to 5,000 words can be sent to The Southampton Review. The fee is $15.

“We won’t even try to tell you what we’re looking for,” a release said. “The comic impulse is so widely and variously expressed in fiction that it resists definition.”

At first glance, Linda Coleman’s “Radical Descent: The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary” looks like another entry in a familiar genre: confessions of a late-1960s, early-1970s radical leftist. Not so fast . . .

“A Certain Summer”

Patricia Beard

Gallery Books, $16

When a few days of Indian summer appear on the East End this autumn, pick up Patricia Beard’s debut novel, “A Certain Summer,” pack a picnic, and enjoy an afternoon of quiet beach reading.

Secrets of Disney Animation

John Canemaker, who won a 2005 Oscar for his animated short “The Moon and the Son,” an imagined conversation with his father, will venture into “the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie Magic,” according to his new book’s subtitle, through one Herman Schultheis next Thursday at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.

“Daring: My Passages”

Gail Sheehy

William Morrow, $29.99

Just as I was finishing Gail Sheehy’s “Daring: My Passages,” I noticed the headline of a story on the New York Times business page: “After a Year Under Bezos, Last Graham to Leave Post.” Katharine Weymouth, the granddaughter of Katharine Graham, the longtime Washington Post publisher, was stepping down. Her departure would bring down the curtain on 80 years of the Graham family’s connection to the prestigious newspaper that reported Watergate.

The Writers Speak series of readings returns to the Stony Brook Southampton campus Wednesday with Vijay Seshadri, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection “3 Sections.” Mr. Seshadri’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry magazine, and The New Yorker, as well as in four editions of The Best American Poetry anthology. He teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Reckless. What a name for a Mongol racehorse turned honorary U.S. Marine with two Purples Hearts, a Bronze Star, and an insatiable appetite for poker chips and beer. No way to treat a filly, you say . . . but then again, Reckless became a legend with a happy ending, no spoilers need apply.

“The Mother Court”

James D. Zirin

American Bar Association, $29.95

What do bishops, celebrities, politicians, generals, professional athletes, Holocaust victims, drug addicts, and just plain folks have in common? All of them have chosen the memoir as the literary vehicle to lay bare their inner lives.

So you go about your life

but there’s a thread unraveling

Each year

the reading of the devastating list

each name hanging in the New York air,

the lips of their children,

their parents,

their wives,

dropping them into place

One woman

presses the back

of another

helping her go on

And still it goes

still only on the A’s

The bell rings

all of them the hardest

Strangers become relatives

The litany

In her latest collection of poems, “Hurt, the Shadow,” Carole Stone gives voice to a historical figure almost never heard from, Josephine Hopper, the wife of the painter Edward Hopper. Ms. Hopper studied at the New York School of Art and was a painter in her own right, yet in marrying a man who would go on to become a giant on the American scene, she became known as his model. She was also a strong influence on his work.

“Kill My Mother”

Jules Feiffer

Liveright Publishing, $27.95

As I eagerly devoured “Kill My Mother,” Jules Feiffer’s brilliantly funny, moving (both emotionally and visually), multilayered film noir homage, I kept thinking this graphic novel could easily transfer to the screen — as an animated film. Hell, it already is an animated film on paper.

Every page in “Kill My Mother” is alive with movement, or what animators call “extreme poses”; that is, storytelling facial and bodily expressions that visually communicate the narrative to an audience.

“Where Nobody

Knows Your Name”

John Feinstein

Doubleday, $26.95

“Managing at that level is the worst job there is in baseball,” Buck Showalter, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles, once said of Triple-A ball, where he led a team for four years after having played his entire career in the minor leagues. “Why? Because no one wants to be there.”