Hamptons Journal: Authors Night: One Cocktail Party Plus a Four Day Festival of Books

Weary of pandemic year lockdown, I was pleased to attend Authors Night 2021 in person under a tent on the East Hampton Library grounds, a scaled back celebration of books and the people who write them. Gone (temporarily) is the voluminous tent in a large field that could hold150 authors. Twenty sat at a long table behind their books in piles: Robert Caro with Working, film critic Jeffrey Lyons’ Hemingway and Me, a memoir of his bonding with the legendary author over bullfights, the latest cookbook from Florence Fabricant (The Ladies’ Village Society Cookbook) seated near the team Hillary Davis and Stacy Dermont, writers of The Hamptons Kitchen. What could be more geared for the pairing of land and sea?

Night life and the social scene! Noel Hankin with his wife Gwen sat behind piles of After Dark:Birth of the Disco Dance Party, about the clubs in midtown that inaugurated the era of Studio 54and celebrity culture. An homage to one person who never missed the party scene, Gwenn & Steven Stolman’s Bill Cunningham was There: Spring Flings and Summer Soirees, sold out almost immediately. Stolman explained how he helped Kurdewan, Bill Cunningham’s editor at The New York Times, assemble this collection of the photographer’s work after they toured the photographs cross country. As  Anna Wintour so aptly put it, “Everyone dressed forBill.” The Vogue icon is a star of Thomas Maier’s All that Glitters: Anna Wintour, Tina Brown,and the rivalry inside America’s Richest Media Empire.

The American Dream was amply represented: the dark side in Michael Schnayerson’s book about Bugsy Siegal, and the mega-success of Auschwitz survivor/ immigrant Siggi B. Wilzig inc Unstoppable. Ivan Wilzig, the subject’s son, showed up in his pink, peace symbol adorned limo to speak about his remarkable dad. Honoring her parents, the actress Tovah Feldshuh’s memoir of her mother, Lilyville, limns her own life growing up in Scarsdale under the shadow of a mega-watt mom.

Books on my to-read list include, Amanda Fairbanks’The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind. The author told me about her extensive research in Montauk, meeting the fishermen and their families. Deborah Copaken’s Lady parts: A Memoir features an intriguing cover, a woman in all her parts like a butcher’s where-to-cut chart.

Adhering too to the spirit of this moment, conversations took place online over a four-day weekend, with Dr. Ruth (You cannot have Authors Night without her), Marcus Samuelsson, Don Lemon, Senator Amy Klobuchar interviewed by Judith Hope, Dan Glickman by Nick Pileggi. If we stay in virus variation limbo, we’ll have world enough and time for books galore.