Books

“Tomorrow There

Will Be Apricots”

Jessica Soffer

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24

   Very little in this book is what I expected it to be.

“Long Island Oddities”

John Leita and Laura Leita

History Press, $17.99

   John Leita and Laura Leita have compiled a collection of accounts, enriched by contributions to their Internet blog over the last 10 years, that share some of Long Island’s oddities. Their book, titled, appropriately enough, “Long Island Oddities: Curious Locales, Unusual Occurrences, and Unlikely Urban Adventures,” comprises six chapters: “Roadside Oddities,” “Oddly Abandoned,” “Ghosts Among Us,” “Close Encounters of the Odd Kind,” “Phantastic Legends,” and “A Grave Difference.”

A Wainwright Homecoming

    Laura Wainwright of the East Hampton Wainwrights will pay a visit to the East Hampton Library on Saturday, “Home Bird,” her book from a year ago, in hand. Subtitled “Four Seasons on Martha’s Vineyard,” it chronicles the life there of an observant and thoughtful nature-lover — a life not unlike many on the South Fork.

“Without a Claim”

Grace Schulman

Mariner Books, $14.95

“Loopers”
John Dunn
Crown, $25

    Sometimes it takes an outsider to really appreciate a place. Remember Maycroft? That immense hulk of a mansion that for years loomed over North Haven in glorious Miss Havisham decrepitude? Though it was bought, entirely renovated, and hidden away behind gates, it may linger in the popular consciousness here as the former home of a private school for girls and then the Rainbow Preschool. But who knew one wing once housed a bunch of itinerant caddies?

“The Illusion of

Separateness”

Simon Van Booy

Harper, $23.99

   As the title of Simon Van Booy’s gentle and lovely new novel, “The Illusion of Separateness,” might suggest, people are connected and intertwined in ways that are not always immediately apparent. Sometimes the manner people are linked never becomes apparent to them at all, but that does not necessarily signify a lack of connection.

Confessions at Canio’s

    Canio’s: the independent gift of a bookstore that keeps on giving. On Saturday, for instance, Joan Cusack Handler, an author of several volumes of poems, will drop by the Sag Harbor shop for a reading from her new book, “Confessions of Joan the Tall,” a lyrical recounting of her Catholic youth in the working-class Bronx of the Eisenhower years. Ms. Handler runs CavanKerry Press in New Jersey and lives part of the year in East Hampton. The reading starts at 5 p.m.

    Indie, activist, hip, smart, relevant? Then you will want to know that the Feminist Press, a nonprofit literary publishing house that takes pride in being all that and more, is holding its annual Hamptons fund-raiser on Sunday, and that B. Smith’s restaurant on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor is the place for the like-minded to be.

“The Letters of

William Gaddis”

Edited by Steven Moore 

Dalkey Archive, $34.50

   Among postwar American novelists, no one was more elusive, and thus engendered more curiosity, than William Gaddis (save Thomas Pynchon, of course). In an era when authors like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal used media to their great advantage, Gaddis sat for few interviews, fewer pictures, and, by my counting, only one television appearance.

   Sylvester Manor spawned two books following a seven-year archaeological dig there, conducted under the direction of Stephen Mrozowski, director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts.

   Mac Griswold will speak about “The Manor” at the site itself, Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, on Saturday at 2 p.m. Blankets and beach chairs are suitable for the free outdoor session, during which the author will read, field questions, and sign copies of the book (available for purchase, naturally). Reservations at [email protected] have been requested.

“The Manor”

Mac Griswold

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $28

   “The Manor” is a fresh and invigorating book reporting on 30 years of Mac Griswold’s search for the truth about the secrets of the manor house located on a creek near the north shore of Shelter Island. In 1653, its builder and owner, Nathaniel Sylvester, owned the entire island and ruled it as a European feudal kingdom — a plantation, as it was politely called.

Mark Doty on “Writer’s Almanac”

    Mark Doty, the Springs poet who won a National Book Award in 2008 for his collection “Fire to Fire,” will have one of his poems, “In the Community Garden,” read on Saturday on American Public Media’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” given voice weekly and richly by Garrison Keillor of “Prairie Home Companion” fame. It can be heard locally on WPPB 88.3 FM.

    The day is, by program tradition, Mr. Doty’s birthday.

Cuba Si, College . . . Also Si

    The East Hampton Library’s Authors Night keeps growing, but then, it’s a fund-raiser, so who’s complaining? Saturday’s mammoth and tented event, which starts at 5 p.m. at the Gardiner Farm at 36 James Lane in the village with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, boasts more than 1,000 expected attendees, untold mountains of books for purchase, and over 100 writers ready to sign them and chat.

“The Way of the Knife”

Mark Mazzetti

Penguin, $29.95

   No matter what political policies you embrace, “The Way of the Knife” is a lively, engaging, factual account of our real war against terrorism — and another real war between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

“Running on Empty”

John A. Strong

Excelsior Editions, $29.95

Fortune in His Eyes

    It’s a long way from escorting Elizabeth Taylor at the Broadway opening of Richard Burton’s “Hamlet” to mediating a prison riot at Attica. But David Rothenberg has not only lived it but written a memoir about it. “Fortune in My Eyes,” from Applause Books, recounts how one of the more successful publicists in theater (later a producer) went on to accompany former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to investigate how Nicaragua’s Sandinista government was treating captured Contra rebels in the 1980s. Among much else in a varied career in civil rights.

    This weekend Peter M. Wolf will be making the rounds thrice over with his new memoir, “My New Orleans, Gone Away.” First, tomorrow at 5 p.m., he’ll read from the book and field questions about it for this summer’s iteration of the popular, shaded, and wet (with libations) Fridays at Five series at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton. Tickets cost $15.

    On Saturday at 5 p.m., it’s due north to Sag Harbor and the venerable Canio’s Books, and then on Sunday, he’ll stop by East Hampton’s friendly neighborhood bookshop, BookHampton, for a 2 p.m. reading.

“My New Orleans,

Gone Away”

Peter M. Wolf

Delphinium, $24.95

   “Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands — and who knows what to do with it?” —Blanche DuBois, Scene 5, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

    Not only is The Southampton Review’s new and loaded summer edition out and about to be celebrated with a couple of readings, the fledgling TSR Editions is unveiling its first effort, a book of photos by the playwright Joe Pintauro, with a reception and gallery show — all tomorrow, all at Stony Brook Southampton.

    Tom Clavin will discuss “The DiMaggios: Three Brothers, Their Passion for Baseball, Their Pursuit of the American Dream” on Saturday for the Amagansett Library’s Authors After Hours series.

    He has been on a baseball biography tear in recent years, this book coming hard on the heels of two others about stars of the New York City scene, Gil Hodges, of the lamented Brooklyn Dodgers and later the often lamentable Mets, and the Bronx Bombers’ Roger Maris, dubbed in that book’s subtitle “Baseball’s Reluctant Hero.”

“The DiMaggios”

Tom Clavin

Ecco, $25.99

    When I told my wife I was reviewing a book titled “The DiMaggios,” she asked me, “There was more than one?” There were, in fact, three — the brothers Joe, Dom, and Vince, all big-league ballplayers of varying skill levels and fame.

“The Art of Steampunk”

    “What is Steampunk? In three short words, Steampunk is Victorian science fiction.” So writes G.D. Falksen in his introduction to “The Art of Steampunk” by Art Donovan, just out in a revised second edition from Fox Chapel Publishing. Victorian is here meant as an evocation, referring to a heavily decorative look, an aesthetic, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically influenced by early industrialization.

And Now, Authors After Hours

    Here’s a summer reading series of some note. Authors After Hours starts Saturday at the Amagansett Library at 6 p.m., when Paul Tough, who has been an editor at The New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, weighs in on the importance simple gumption plays in children’s future life outcomes. More so than I.Q., he argues in “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.”

“Cooper and the

Enchanted Metal

Detector”

Adam Osterweil

Namelos Books, $18.95

   Goodbye school, hello summer reading. “Cooper and the Enchanted Metal Detector” is a novel for middle-grade readers that takes place over the course of a pivotal summer for Cooper, the 10 (or perhaps 11)-year-old protagonist. A complete epoch can occur bookended by June and August, and Adam Osterweil, who has brought young readers “The Comic Book Kid” and “The Amulet of Komondor,” among others, seems to know all about the arc of summer.

   During a recent visit with Grace Schulman, a poet, translator, and professor, she remarked that the phone lines at her house were full of static.

    But she hadn’t called for a repair, she said — her Springs house, and the beaches and all of the corners of the hamlet, are a refuge where she takes in the observations that later emerge in her poems.

    A former poetry editor at The Nation, where she revived a poetry contest, Ms. Schulman directed the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for a decade.

A Summer of Friday Authors

    There are readings, and then there are readings at which you can wipe your mouth of a toothsome hors d’oeuvre, rise from your folding chair, and direct a question of your choosing at the author in attendance, plastic tumbler of chardonnay in hand.

“My Daughter, Myself”

Linda Wolfe

Greenpoint Press, $20

   On a Mother’s Day visit to Texas to see her only daughter, Jessica, mother of two small children, a mother’s worst nightmare begins. Suffering from dizziness and a splitting headache, Jessica is rushed to the emergency room. A CT scan and “every test known to women” are given and Jessica is sent home, diagnosed with a migraine.

“Dreadful”

David Margolick

Other Press, $28.95

New From Rosenblatt (et al.)

    Oh sure, it’s a group reading, but there must be privileging. At least when Roger Rosenblatt clears his resonant throat to offer up some new prose — in this case, from “The Boy Detective,” a forthcoming memoir about growing up in the Big Apple.