Books

    When James Whitfield Thomson hemmed and hawed in describing just what his new novel, “Lies You Wanted to Hear,” was about, his daughter challenged him to think in terms of what would go on a movie poster. His answer: “What could make a good man do such a thing?”

“In Pinelight”

Thomas Rayfiel

TriQuarterly, $18.95

    “In Pinelight,” the sixth novel by Thomas Rayfiel, is narrated by an old, crotchety man living in a home for seniors. The novel is essentially a continuous reminiscing monologue. There is an interrogator who remains nameless and faceless throughout. We never hear his voice. What we do hear is the narrator responding to, or repeating, the interrogator’s questions.

“Death of the Black-Haired Girl”

By Robert Stone

    Even B+ Robert Stone is better than almost everybody else. The setup is conventional: an affair between a student and professor at a university bearing more than a passing resemblance to Yale. But the way it unravels is wholly unpredictable, as is every line of Mr. Stone’s dialogue — especially his New Yawk police talk — which remains (the author is 76) utterly realistic and yet somehow never clichéd.

    What follows is an excerpt from the poet Philip Schultz’s new “novel in verse,” more than 10 years in the making and due out from W.W. Norton in February. In it, a young man hides from the Vietnam draft by changing his name ever so slightly and going to work in obscure drudgery in the basement office of a Bay Area social services agency. He keeps himself busy, in part, by translating his mother’s diaries having to do with a 1941 slaughter of Jews by their Polish neighbors.     

“The Most of

Nora Ephron”

Alfred A. Knopf, $35

     When Nora Ephron died last year at the age of 71, there was an outpouring of personal and public grief greater than any I can recall for a contemporary American writer or film director. I knew her only as an acquaintance, an always charming and gracious presence, but her close friends still speak of other, more compelling qualities, especially her extraordinary generosity to those younger women — neophytes in her own professions — whom she mentored and encouraged.

Bulova Unbound

    “In 2013, a decrepit, abandoned former watchcase factory in a small, seaside town is undergoing an extreme renovation, to be re-imagined as a luxury apartment building.”

“& Sons”

David Gilbert

Random House, $27

     Add David Gilbert’s “& Sons” to the short list of this year’s best novels. Mr. Gilbert’s foot is on the gas from the very beginning of this ambitious, chance-taking novel and he never lets it up. He brilliantly balances a multilayered story of familial relationships and lifelong friendships and breathes new and exciting life into what can be the too familiar stories of father-son relationships and of writers and the tribulations of the writing life.

"Reports"

Kathryn Levy

New Rivers Press, $14.95

 Capote Christmas

       Truman Capote, whose fans are as diverse as they are legion, from macho Norman Mailer to your local florist, was never more sentimental than in “A Christmas Memory,” that autobiographical tale of his close boyhood relationship with his much older yet childlike cousin. Now, on Sunday at 1:30 p.m., two actors, Tom DeWolfe and Jere Jacob, will give voice to the story at the Amagansett Library.

       Country life in the F.D.R.-era South, fruitcakes, love, and loss — pull up a chair, won’t you? The reading’s free.

Poems of Parenthood

      While many Americans had some memory of or reaction to the recent 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Christina Haag had a more personal investment than most in the tributes and recreations of the events that day.

       Only a child herself at the time, she would come to know, befriend, and then fall in love with the president’s only son, John F. Kennedy Jr., a story she recounted as part of her memoir, “Come to the Edge: A Love Story,” published by Spiegel and Grau in 2011.

Return of the Lit Lunch

    Chris Knopf and Christina Haag will pull up chairs and clink silverware at this year’s benefit authors lunch at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor on Dec. 8. The noon to 2:30 p.m. meal comes courtesy of the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library.

    That library, of course, isn’t alone in undergoing a renovation and expansion, it’s just that in this case it’s been nigh unto interminable, perhaps making a celebratory lunch all the more so.

“The Boy Detective”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco, $19.99

    Roger Rosenblatt may have just invented a beguiling subgenre — call it mem-noir — in which remembrance loops along a dark trail of switchbacks and time-jumps like a memoir narrated by an erudite, shape-shifting shamus. The protagonist is the 11-ish Roger, who prowls his Manhattan neighborhood and his childhood as if he were a private eye. Lurking in the shadows is the 70-ish Roger, the real gumshoe, trying to figure out how everything and nothing has changed.

    The number of young people in today’s information-overloaded America who are managing to make a living writing poetry probably exceeds the nation’s current population of ivory-billed woodpeckers, but both birds and poets are indisputably endangered.

The eyes of the fox are shells,

Her home is sand, this luminous beach.

She is washed by saltwater, bleached by sun,

Wrapped in the calcium ribbon of shellfish.

Her body is a skeletal map, a lens, a geographic mark.

Did she leave the security of oaks,

Descend the dune of scrub and marl,

Or rise, carried by the waves of the Sound?

Myriad things come forth

To make the map of eyes and bone,

To mark the art of shell and stone.

Water, wind, stone, luminous sand, wind, water . . .

“Mary Coin”

Marisa Silver

Blue Rider Press, $26.95

    If, as the popular wisdom holds, a single picture is worth a thousand words, then it is not entirely surprising when an iconic photograph inspires a novel of some 325 pages. Neither is it surprising when, in the hands of a gifted writer, the resulting novel is a small masterpiece.

    Let’s start with the upbeat. Marsha King’s Kickstarter campaign in support of her forthcoming self-published book, “A Fine Day for Fishing,” surpassed its goal. The increasingly popular fund-raising tool in this brave new world of do-it-yourself brought in 79 contributors and more than $3,500 in pledges before wrapping up on Nov. 1.

“Still Writing”

Dani Shapiro

Atlantic Monthly Press, $24

    The novelist who taught my writing workshop liked to tell us that people who have had happy childhoods start hedge funds or run for Congress — but they don’t become writers. While I wouldn’t put money on that equation, Dani Shapiro, in “Still Writing,” her elegant, inspiring, and practical guide to living the writer’s life, is a vivid illustration of his point.

The Fall of the College

    So what do you think went wrong at Southampton College: mere mismanagement? Perpetually insufficient funding for the redheaded stepchild of the Long Island University system? Deep-pocketed trustees failing to pony up as promised? Or was it doomed from its misguided Vietnam War-era conception as a safe haven for academically uninspired rich kids seeking to avoid the draft . . .

“Memories

of a Marriage”

Louis Begley

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.95

     I live in Springs. I have no idea how they live South of the Highway.  

    Rock stars, movie divinities, hedge fund wizards, white-collar bandits — the world lifts its wondering eyes to the oceanside Hamptons. TVs and tabloids, commercial books and magazines, they all feed on fame and fortune.

    But what if the truth got out?

Kathryn Levy, There and Here

    Perusing this page on a westbound Hampton Jitney? Valued reader, much thanks. But your time in the city doesn’t mean you can’t get a dose of South Fork-style culture. Tomorrow night at 7, Kathryn Levy, a Sag Harbor poet, will be bending the paperback covers of her new collection, “Reports,” for a reading at Poets House, the archive and cultural center at 10 River Terrace in Manhattan.

“Knock Knock”

Suzanne McNear

Permanent Press, $28

    Feet in autobiography, heart in the novel, Suzanne McNear’s “Knock Knock” plays around with what’s what in the wide, seductive world of literary possibility.

    This is not a Holocaust story. So says Marilyn Gottlieb of her new book, “Life With an Accent,” which she’ll talk about at the East Hampton Library on Saturday.

“Confessions of

Joan the Tall”

Joan Cusack Handler

CavanKerry Press, $21

    The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons’ library in the Bridgehampton Community House, which was has been closed for renovations, will celebrate its reopening Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. with a reception for the public and members of the alliance. The library has Long Island’s largest collection of horticultural books, magazines, and videos.

“Hurt, the Shadow”

Carole Stone

Dos Madres Press, $16

    The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda famously wrote, “I sang for those who had no voice.” Carole Stone echoes the declaration in her new collection of poems, all of which are written in the imagined voice of Josephine Hopper. Ms. Hopper studied at the New York School of Art and was a painter her entire life, yet, as Lee Krasner did Jackson Pollock, she married a painter, Edward Hopper.

    Each year since 2006, the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor has held One for the Books, a literary-themed fund-raiser. Up until this year, the idea was that various hosts would serve dinner and a book chosen by the event committee would be discussed (between tidbits of local gossip). To add a smidgen of intrigue, guests chose the book they wanted to discuss first, and only then was the host’s identity revealed. The books could be any kind: old, new, obscure, whatever.

“Someone”

Alice McDermott

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25

    The first time I became enthralled with Alice McDermott’s fiction was when I read her second novel, “That Night,” a beautiful and haunting novel about an all-consuming first love set in the 1960s on Long Island. Through a 10-year-old narrator, a neighbor next door, Ms. McDermott brilliantly and sensuously evokes a world of dangerous love, loss, fear, and desperation through the prism of a single summer night.

“Alterations”

Rita Plush

Penumbra, $9.99

    Rita Plush, the author of a group of stories published under the title “Alterations,” tells us in her introduction that these are stories that have lived in her memory and “hark back more than fifty years.” Perhaps that’s the problem. We’ve heard and read similar stories of early immigrant Jewish life many times before. They are moving but well-worn territory.

Bookish Dinners

    Where renovations and expansions continue apace, as at Sag Harbor’s venerable John Jermain Memorial Library, can a fund drive be far behind?

    The library’s capital campaign will be bolstered once more by One for the Books, a raft of benefit dinners held at various residences and attended by Sag Harbor authors ready to be chatted up or peppered with questions. This year the dates are Oct. 12 and 19 — yes, two Saturdays, for you weekenders out there — from 6 to 8 p.m., though who really knows once the booze starts flowing. Tickets cost $100.

Simon Says

    Not only is Simon Van Booy one of the more talented young fiction writers going, his first published work appeared in this newspaper. Yes, that’s self-referential of us to point out, but we thought you’d like to know. He has written well-received collections of short stories, one of which, “Love Begins in Winter,” won a Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and has just come out with his second novel, “The Illusion of Separateness.” He’ll talk about it on Wednesday at noon for a brown bag lunch at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.