Books

Ellen Feldman’s new historical novel brings vivid characters, juicy details, skillful pacing, and a solid plot, all in post-World War II New York.

The author of “Soil and Spirit” will be in discussion with Evan Harris, writer and Star book reviewer, on Saturday at Guild Hall.

No ships off the empty coast in February? No nothing? The birds say different.

Rachel Shteir delivers a fresh, scholarly reassessment of a legendary second-wave feminist who’s taken her lumps in recent years.

A reading by Vanessa Cuti, the author of “The Tip Line,” a thriller based on the Gilgo Beach murders, will launch the monthly Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton.

Carole Stone’s latest collection offers understated poems of loss, widowhood, and forging on, but nowhere is there self-pity or bitterness, only optimism.

In her memoir “Castles & Ruins,” Rue Matthiessen looks to recapture the mystery and magic of Ireland — and of her mother.

Stan Herman’s memoir details the successful career of a designer both popular and commercial, while evoking all the color and character of the old garment district.

In “Lost Long Island,” Richard Panchyk lays out 21 examples of industries, people, places, things, and ways of life that have vanished from our fair Island.

Céline Keating’s novel tells a story of Montauk vanishing before our eyes, with all the underlying social and economic tensions and environmental woes triggered by its booming popularity.

With “Quiet Street,” Nick McDonell has penned the unlikeliest of memoirs, detailing success and more success among the one percenters.

Best-read man picks 10 best books, for the best year-end list you’ll find.

Electing an American president was Rupert Murdoch’s dream turned nightmare, Michael Wolff writes in his gossipy, occasionally obscene account of power and politics, “The Fall.”

Idylls at an artist’s compound in Springs, an allegory for our times, and calming words of affirmation: It’s The Star’s kids’ book roundup.

In his collection of essays Ralph Sneeden’s muse is the waters of North Sea and the South Shore, from boating to surfing, from boyhood to late middle age.

Richard Brockman has written a deeply personal account of how he slowly, painfully freed himself from the trauma of his mother’s suicide in order to reclaim and recreate the narrative of his life.

The M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton is offering an open house at the campus’s Lichtenstein Center, with readings by faculty and students. It starts at 6 p.m. on Dec. 6 in Chancellors Hall.

Will Hermes gives us Lou Reed in full: complicated, scandalous, arty, poetic, ambisexual, temperamental, a battler through critical and commercial disappointments.

In “Fierce Ambition” Jennet Conant resurrects a tenacious female war correspondent, Maggie Higgins, largely ignored by journalistic history.

With “The Helsinki Affair” Anna Pitoniak ventures into what John le Carré called the secret world, where spies can have lives even more hidden than those that come with their tradecraft — a potentially disastrous duality. 

Alice McDermott’s new novel gives us remarkably realistic characters while fleshing out the zeitgeist of the 1960s as experienced by American women expats in Vietnam.

Francis Levy talks his new story collection, “The Kafka Studies Department,” while Brooke Kroeger and David Alpern discuss her book “Undaunted” and women in the history of journalism.

This medical mystery broadens its concerns into an exploration of the intransigence and arrogance of the giant bureaucracy that is the U.S. Army.

How Kurt Vonnegut, acerbic citizen of Planet Earth, anticipated the current ecological crisis and the need to go green.

Alice Carriere, daughter of famous artist-and-actor parents, blows away the standard memoir fare with graphic accounts of self-abuse and a blitz of pharmaceuticals.

William J. Mann’s “Bogie & Bacall” plows into the star couple’s roughly decade and a half together — insightfully and exhaustively.

Mark Matousek will elucidate “Lessons From an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life” on Friday at The Church in Sag Harbor.

John Sargent’s memoir reveals an informed guide to modern publishing, and then some: from heading up Macmillan to fighting off Amazon.

Philip Schultz and Grace Schulman talk poets and poetry at Duck Creek, while A.M. Homes and Carl Bernstein hash out the political moment.

Paul Harding longlisted, Richard Brockman as survivor, Fran Castan and Canio Pavone read.