Books

We’ll never tire of Elvis, and, when it comes to rock ’n’ roll, he represents the exponential leap from what was to what is, a point that is well made in Richard Zoglin’s “Elvis in Vegas,” which chronicles the King’s return to live performing from the self-imposed gulag of his B-movie-making period.

Michael Shnayerson’s “Boom” traces the growth of a burgeoning postwar art world and its expansion into the head-spinning mega-market it is today, fueled by insatiable collectors, resourceful, combative art dealers, and a shifting array of artists.

The 12 linked stories in Joel Mowdy’s debut collection offer a 1990s tour of young lives in a place not so very far from the Hamptons, but very far indeed psychically and economically.

From Lucas Hunt’s latest thematically linked collection of poems, “Hamptons,” published by Thane & Prose.

The East Hampton Library’s Authors Night benefit will convene once again at 555 Montauk Highway in Amagansett, with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, hobnobbing, and book signings starting at 5 p.m. on Saturday.

Clay Risen’s engaging “The Crowded Hour” tells the story of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, while focusing on the Spanish-American War as the turning point in America’s role in the larger world.

In “The Urethane Revolution,” John O'Malley tells “the greatest story never told in extreme sports history,” the 1975 birth of skateboarding, courtesy of a “hippy skunkworks of garages and shacks” in the Southern California sunshine. He'll read from it at a book launch at the Montauk Beach House on Friday, Aug. 9.

With “American Moonshot,” Douglas Brinkley has written a magisterial history of the space age and an affectionate valentine to those brave astronauts who flew to the moon, the politicians who dealt with the art of the possible, and above all to John F. Kennedy. He'll be at Authors Night in Amagansett on Aug. 10.

Ted Chiang, in his new collection of science-fiction stories, clearly enjoys imagining technological advances taken to the extreme, “Black Mirror” style, but you sense his ambivalence as he wonders what we're really doing to ourselves.

From "Mourning Songs," a poetry anthology just published by New Directions and edited by Grace Schulman. She will read new poems and excerpts from her recent memoir, "Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage," on Aug. 3 at 5 p.m. at the Amagansett Library.

With “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead takes us deep into the Jim Crow-era South of the 1960s, in a novel based on the true story of a Florida reform school where wayward boys were trapped in a kind of hell on earth.

“Ballpark” is an architecture critic’s paean to the idiosyncrasies of old beauties like Fenway Park and the smart city-integrating design of new stadiums like Camden Yards. But hold the “concrete doughnuts,” please.