Books

Actors — talented actors, that is — are usually amusing raconteurs and often good writers. They have a love of language, the sensuous savoring of the perfect phrase, and they develop a feeling for the dramatic arc of a scene, the timing of a punch line. So it is not surprising that Hal Holbrook, in his autobiography, “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain,” relates an arresting and vividly told life story, both personal and professional.

Right around the corner from our boys’ grade school,

they’d go there — first with us and then, older enough,

with their friends — for after-school treats, Everett’s

bushy mustache always smiling behind the counter.

Thirty-three years is a long time to know someone,

let alone a grocery store, and one could claim that

three generations of kids passed through his doors.

When Augie, our 12-year-old, told me about the sign

on the door he looked away, maybe from the idea itself —

    Here’s how it went: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was at a posh Bastille Day brunch at an oceanfront East Hampton home. A young woman, newly arrived on the East End, trying to make conversation over the smoked salmon tray, offered: “Oh, I’m from Indianapolis, too.” Whereupon Vonnegut, of the rumpled face and sweet, bovine eyes, said: “My mother committed suicide. She should have done it a lot earlier.”

“And So It Goes”

Charles J. Shields

Henry Holt, $30

Poets Pack a Gallery

    It’s billed as a Valentine’s Day reading of poems — but loosely. The day, Saturday, is after the fact, and the definition of a love poem has been expanded to include, for example, a love for the world.

Look Ahead, Writers

    February on eastern Long Island. It can seem like the calendar’s equivalent of 3 a.m., when nothing good happens, not even snow. But using the down time to plan for better days — how about July? — is Julie Sheehan, the director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton, who sends word of a boatload of writing workshops bound to set heads nodding in appreciation.

    Out this week in paperback, Helen Schulman’s “This Beautiful Life” is a highly contemporary tale of woe. The novel looks at how a family manages and fails to manage in the grip of a thoroughly distressing sticky wicket brought on by the ills of the exponential Internet and exacerbated by the ills of the family in question. The book is a peek at how individuals operate in society and within a family given ills all around — given life in this novel being something of a mess, it turns out, in spite of the luck, privilege, and striving of the characters.

“Elizabeth and Hazel”

David Margolick

Yale University Press, $26

  Elizabeth and Hazel, two women of Little Rock captured in an iconic photograph, tell the story of Southern school desegregation. The classic frame reveals our beautiful young black heroine, Elizabeth Eckford, as she is harried by a hydra-headed lynch mob in formation. Hazel, the long-unidentified woman behind Elizabeth, is shown screaming racial epithets while dogging the heels of the slender, apparently serene and stoic schoolchild.

“Pushcart Prize XXXVI”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $18.95

Now in its 36th year, the annual Pushcart Prize anthology, “Best of the Small Presses,” has become a standard title for anyone interested in a sampling of who or what is happening in contemporary American literature.

    Now in its 36th year, the annual Pushcart Prize anthology, “Best of the Small Presses,” has become a standard title for anyone interested in a sampling of who or what is happening in contemporary American literature.

“My Dyslexia”

Philip Schultz

W.W. Norton, $21.95

I have read one scene in “My Dyslexia” over and over. Each time I read it, the writing is clearer, and the pain I feel when reading the words is more palpable: “I remember the first time I even considered the idea of being a writer. I was in the fifth grade when my reading tutor . . . asked me out of the blue what I thought I might like to do with my life. Without a moment’s hesitation, I answered that I wanted to be a writer.”

    If New York’s Gilded Age had once appeared to be gently disappearing into the pages of the history books, the last few years, laden with financial malfeasance, Wall Street greed, burgeoning poverty, and an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, have made it chillingly relevant.

“Incognito”

Gregory Murphy

Berkley Books, $15

“Kayak Morning”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco, $13.99

    Last year was the year of the grief memoir. Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story” concerns the loss of her husband. Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye” takes as its subject the death of her mother. Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights” mourns the death of her daughter. In those works, through the act of memory, the authors skillfully bring to life the loved one who is mourned.

“The Last Whaler”

Nicholas Stevensson Karas

AuthorHouse, $25

    When I checked my morning mail several months ago, I was surprised by a large mystery envelope. I was delighted to see it contained a local historical novel. These are rare creatures out here on the tip of Long Island; not as rare as academics trying to put into words our underpublished history, but still rare enough to cause me to look it over before placing it on my stack of evening reading.

    Another year . . . and another totally subjective list of my favorite books of the year. As ever, it is a personal list, and one that totally leans toward my own sensibilities. And yet I can’t imagine a reader picking up any one of these books and not being challenged, stimulated, or wildly entertained — or all three at once. I hope you find one you enjoy.

    Happy holidays.

“The Pale King”

“Portrait of Long Island”

    When it comes to gift-giving, books are all well and good as gestures, but, let’s face it, they almost always go unread. This is where the picture book comes in — thoughtfulness acknowledged, it can be flipped through in a matter of seconds and placed for all time on a coffee table as decoration.

    Reading Warren H. Phillips’s new autobiography, “Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal,” I was reminded of the expression commonly mistaken for an ancient Chinese curse — “May you live in interesting times.” Once one comes to understand that these words are neither ancient, Chinese, nor a curse, it becomes easy to appreciate them as a good wish, something to be made the most of. That is exactly what Mr. Phillips does.

Poetry in Patchogue

    As the book review on this page indicates, Patchogue contains multitudes.

    On one hand, as an example, the compiler of this column heard his physics teacher at Bridgehampton High circa 1985 express a not uncommon view when he began a discussion of the place with, “If God were to give New York an enema. . . .”

    Thomas McGonigle’s “Going to Patchogue” is a slight, basically plotless metafictional novel of loss, identity, and discovery. First published by the Dalkey Archive Press in 1992 and out of print for a number of years, it has recently been reissued in a paperback edition. The Dalkey Archive is a small publisher known for its interest in less traditional literary works.

Lit Lunch in Sag

    Call it a Sag Harbor affair: Two authors and residents feted at a lunch held in Ted Conklin’s American Hotel, the linchpin establishment in large part responsible some 40 years ago for sparing the village its lot as a half-abandoned wreck fit for wharf rats.

    It’s what we have in common that makes us unique. 

    I’m not sure whether that’s a quote from somebody or my own thoughts as I read “The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, From Cairo to Brooklyn” by Lucette Lagnado.

    What was the greatest discovery of all time?

    Attributed to Albert Einstein, it was compound interest. To the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, it was the discovery of the method of discovery. To Mel Brooks, it was Saran Wrap, because it’s transparent and it keeps food fresh. According to my wife, Celia, the greatest discovery (actually an invention) was the thermos jug, because when you put hot stuff in, it stays hot, and when you put cold stuff in, it stays cold, and, what’s more, it knows when to do what!

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“A More Perfect Heaven”

    In his new book depicting aspects of the history of the Town of Southampton, David Goddard, a sociologist, sets out to trace the “colonization of the village” in the late-19th century and to document “efforts at outside economic development.” These processes, he maintains, brought the town into the “modern age” and transformed it.

Poets Against Hunger

    As part of a nationwide effort to alleviate hunger, Mark Doty of Springs, a winner of a National Book Award, will head up a group of poets getting together at the Springs Presbyterian Church on Sunday for a reading. The goal is focused: to take in donations of food and money for the Springs Food Pantry. George Wallace, a former Suffolk County poet laureate, will also read, as will Fran Castan, Teri Kennedy, Rosalind Brenner, and Carol Alexander, among others.

Caution: This review is probably not for the sexually faint of heart. “Seven Days in Rio,” the second novel by Francis Levy, is the story of Kenny Cantor, a C.P.A. from New York City who has come to Rio de Janeiro as a sex tourist

    Every “Seinfeld” fan recalls the episode in which Jerry’s wacky neighbor incorporates himself and takes on a young intern named Darren. Darren’s duties at Kramerica include laundry detail and scheduling high tea with a certain Mr. Newman. We laugh because it’s clever. It doesn’t matter that the kid’s being used, that he’s wasting money on empty credits and ridiculous experiences. Sanity prevails in a neat 22 minutes when his college dean puts a stop to it.

“The Journals of Spalding Gray”
Edited by Nell Casey
Alfred A. Knopf, $28.95

    Creatives have the propensity to see life in quotations. However Job-like their experience, the proclivity and ability to turn it into art is ultimately a redeeming factor. Naturally the inclination to treat all of experience as a palette can also have a distancing effect. Nothing is ever taken at face value or enjoyed for what it is.

Francis Levy’s “Seven Days”

    What price buttocks? Ask Kenny Cantor, he’s a money-minded Manhattan C.P.A. taking a sex tour of a profligate South American city in Francis Levy’s “Seven Days in Rio,” just out from Two Dollar Radio. Mr. Levy, who has a house in Wainscott, will read from the novel on Saturday at 3 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

    Ellen Feldman’s “Next to Love” is an appealing and swiftly moving historical novel. The book leaves its mark through careful attention to detail along with a keen tracking of the emotional current that runs through the lives of the characters during and in the wake of World War II.

“Next to Love”

Ellen Feldman

Spiegel & Grau, $25

Who’da thunk Franz Kafka would have said, “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.” Maybe his translator spelled dog backward by mistake. On second thought, perhaps it’s a fitting observation from the creator of several of literature’s most tortured souls.      

Bill Henderson, founder of the Pushcart Press, contemplates the dog-God connection in his just-published memoir, “All My Dogs: A Life” — this and much more.       

    “They’re having a kid? His life’s over.”

    I heard those only half-joking words at a summer barbecue a few years ago. It took me a while before I could complete the thought: “And a new, richer one begins.”

    What’s nice about “Pobble’s Way” (Flashlight Press, $16.95) by Simon Van Booy is that on a winter walk a father’s flights of fancy match his daughter’s, and the two play off each other. To him, a leaf is a butterfly raft. To her, a mushroom is a frog umbrella.