Books

30 Years of Fridays at Five

    Always a highlight of the summer season for those who enjoy quaffing chardonnay from plastic tumblers while listening to a top author read, the Fridays at Five series at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton is now ready to mark its 30th year.

“Building the Uqbar Dinghy”

    The last time Redjeb Jordania spoke at the East Hampton Library, it had to do with his 2012 memoir, “All My Georgias.” The history there is that his father was the first president of that country, and his family fled to France in 1921 in the face of Soviet occupation.

    And now for something completely different from the Springs resident: On Saturday he’ll lead a discussion of his new book, “Building the Uqbar Dinghy,” which refers to a pram-nosed craft of his own design and construction. It starts at 1 p.m.

“The Noble Hustle”

Colson Whitehead

Doubleday, $24.95

From Hannibal to Steinbeck

    It’s a digital jungle out there, writers, and Ed Hannibal, who recently saw two of his novels, “Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks” and “A Trace of Red,” reissued as e-paperbacks through the Authors Guild BackinPrint program, will offer guidance for those seeking to find their way tomorrow at 6 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. Mr. Hannibal, who lives in Springs, is also heading up a workshop, the ABCs of Creative Writing, on Wednesdays at the Amagansett Library.

    I don’t know what a wipe warmer is, but it sounds like something I’d like to try.  

“Fire Island: Past, Present,

and Future”

Robert F. Sayre

Oystercatcher Books, $24.95

     Robert F. Sayre, a retired English professor from Iowa, had the pleasure of spending his summers from childhood onward at the family house in Point O’ Woods on Fire Island. From this long-term, personal experience, he gained a valuable perspective about this roadless island that is accessed by pedestrian ferry boats from the mainland of Long Island.

    Whiskers, a triangle of pink, a couple of floppy ears: Nosing into your periphery in time for Easter, yet incongruously attuned to an altogether different ancient teacher, comes “Bunny Buddhism: Hopping Along the Path to Enlightenment” (Perigee, $14), Krista Lester’s book of snippets of wisdom to help get you through your day.

    Here’s a date to thumb into your e-calendar. Friday, April 25, will mark the first of what is planned as an annual benefit and reading, the Poetry Affair, at LTV Studios in Wainscott to mark, in turn, National Poetry Month.

“Andrew’s Brain”

E.L. Doctorow

Random House, $26

    The casual reader may be a bit surprised coming to E.L. Doctorow’s latest novel, “Andrew’s Brain,” not to find a story imbued with historical detail. The general perception of Mr. Doctorow is as a writer of historical fiction — even if this is a misleading delimitation — thanks to the sweeping historical canvases found in such works as “The Book of Daniel,” “Ragtime,” or “The March.”

    Now that spring is here, Maryann Calendrille, your friendly neighborhood bookseller, is calling all scribes to consider planting seeds of writerly creativity in a six-week workshop. It starts next Thursday at 10 a.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

    Dubbed Spring Ink, “the small-group workshop will focus on narrative prose. Readings, writing assignments, and constructive critique are part of the course work,” says a related mass email.

“Leaving China”

James McMullan

Algonquin, $19.95

    Before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and so entered World War II, war had been raging between China and Japan for four years. In 1937, long-simmering tensions burst into warfare, as the Japanese rapidly occupied large swaths of China. One family’s life in that time and place is revealed to beautiful effect in James McMullan’s graphic memoir, “Leaving China.”

“The Cool School”

Edited by Glenn O’Brien

Library of America, $27.95

     It’s early in 2014, but I’m already throwing in my bid for most rankling title of the year with “The Cool School: Writing From America’s Hip Underground.” It takes a special kind of hubris to declare oneself an arbiter of cool and hip, never mind the naiveté to ignore the effects of years of irony on these words, mangled as they are now to the point of near incomprehension.

    Russia’s gone blooey? Call in an expert.

    Masha Gessen, a Russian-American who blogs about that country’s culture and politics for The New York Times’s website, will try to make some sense of the turmoil when she speaks at the Stony Brook Southampton campus for the Writers Speak series Wednesday night.

New BookHampton Book Group

    The newest of BookHampton’s locations, at 16 Hampton Road in Southampton, is now offering a lunchtime book group. Led by Mary Braverman, late of Rowdy Readers in East Hampton, it meets every other Wednesday at noon at La Parmigiana restaurant, down the street from the bookstore.  For this Wednesday, the 26th, the title is “Three Strong Women” by Marie NDiaye.

“Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws”

Ellen NicKenzie Lawson

Excelsior Editions, $19.95

    It was near midnight on Jan. 16, 1920, and at the Park Avenue Hotel in New York, waiters and patrons were dressed in all black and drank liquor from black glasses. Let Ellen NicKenzie Lawson take it from there: “At midnight the ballroom was darkened and a spotlight focused on two couples ceremoniously taking a black bottle from an open coffin in the center of the room, pouring out the last drops, and holding black handkerchiefs to their faces to wipe away tears.”  

    The Old Schoolhouse in Greenport last held a kindergarten class in 1932. And now for something completely different: On March 15 Robin Becker will read there from “Tiger Heron,” her new collection of poems from the University of Pittsburgh Press with subject matter ranging from her lesbianism to her Russian-Jewish heritage to her upbringing in conformist 1950s America to art history.

“Seedtime”

Scott Chaskey

Rodale, $23.99

“A Shed for Wood”

Daniel Thomas Moran

Salmon Poetry, $21.95

    “A Shed for Wood” begins with a quote from Henry David Thoreau: “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.”

“The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Norton, $19.95

    Styron fans, prepare for an insider’s view: Alexandra Styron will be the first to the lectern for the spring’s Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton on Wednesday with “Reading My Father,” her recent book about her relationship with William Styron, who died in 2006. The free event starts at 7 p.m., upstairs in Chancellors Hall’s Radio Lounge. Ms. Styron is the author of a novel, “All the Finest Girls,” and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.

“The Heart Of

Everything That Is”

Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

Simon and Schuster, $30

    “The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend” is an inspired achievement. The authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin have dug deep into contemporaneous newspaper stories, eyewitness accounts, military records, and a long-lost autobiography dictated by Red Cloud, “the only American Indian in history to defeat the United States Army in a war, forcing the government to sue for peace on his terms.”

    There is a poem in Philip Schultz’s book “Failure,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2008, called “The Reasonable Houses of Osborne Lane.” Shifting from “cottages slowly blooming into mansions” to “neighbors carried in and out of ambulances” to “long azure afternoons dragging shadows toward twilight,” its acute observations of the everyday are infused with grace and a hint of the elegiac.

It is a good thing to keep compilations of Truman Capote’s work up to date, in print, on the bookstore shelves, and in library catalogs.

Chaskey on “Seedtime”

    Scott Chaskey, who, depending on your view, looks like Michelangelo’s vision of the Almighty or else a McCoy-hating Hatfield, has a new book out from Rodale, “Seedtime,” which comes with the explanatory subtitle “On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds.” Mr. Chaskey — need it be said? — runs Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, but also, less famously, lives in Sag Harbor, and he’ll remain at home in that village for a reading and book talk at Canio’s on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Elaine’s: One Last Course

“The Nicolls of

Sachem’s Neck”

Patricia and Edward Shillingburg

Cedar Grove Press, $25

    Have you ever wondered what the rest of the letter said, when you come across a mystifying tidbit reprinted in a book of letters where the editor has made selections all too sparingly, and without enough commentary to fill in the gaps?

“Almost Rain”

Simon Perchik

River Otter Press, $12.99

    Anyone who observes the weather can see how nature transforms things into other things; rain turns dirt into mud. Similar processes have their effects on human lives, only we take them more personally; the seasons feel as if they correspond to our actual beginning and end. In the poetry of Simon Perchik, this elemental realm merges with individual consciousness, in careful and courageous language, to bring polymorphic awareness to life.

For Ye of Some Faith

    “Recipes for a Sacred Life” may sound like one of those self-help books that will boost your wellness best if bypassed, but in fact it’s a collection of true stories drawn from the author’s life and aimed at a subtle, everyday kind of enlightenment.

“Nature Wars”

Jim Sterba

Broadway Books, $14.95

    Last September, deer became a deeply personal issue for me, and I crossed over to the other side, where I’d never been before.

    I live in the woods of the North Fork along with an expanding family of deer that I wish I didn’t have to see every day. Ten years ago I would hold my breath and run for my camera on the family’s occasional visits, exulting over my relationship to nature. I felt privileged and honored by their presence.

“Cries of the Lost”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $28

     A smartphone is a useful tool, although, say, reading a novel on one might leave something to be desired. How about reading a novel about one?

“From Scratch”

Allen Salkin

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27.95

    In the age of slow food, cooking reality shows, gourmet magazines, epicurean specialty shops, food blogs, celebrity chefs, and enough blockbuster cookbooks to fill a metropolitan library, it’s hard to believe that there was ever a time when the idea of a food network sounded like pure lunacy.