DISCOVERIES

Time & Tide

A Walk Through Nantucket

Frank Conroy

Crown Journeys: 144 pp., $16

Places have inspired some of our favorite authors. In “Time & Tide,” Frank Conroy, author of “Stop Time,” “Body and Soul” and director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop writes about 50 years of going to Nantucket. Back in 1955, at 19, he spent a summer playing piano in the Whaler’s Lounge. He built a house on the island, married, divorced, fell in love and married again. He opened his own roadhouse with two friends, started a jazz band and watched it all fall apart. During the ‘70s he was a year-rounder; now he’s there two months a year. He is most in love with the landscape off-season, when “the moors change colors, veering toward purple, and the sunlight turns winey.”

But where these sorts of books and essays can be relentlessly cheerful, misty, even soulful “meditations” on place, Conroy seems plainly, touchingly confused about the changes on the “faraway island” as the Native Americans living on Martha’s Vineyard once called it. Though Nantucket has always been rich (thanks to money from whale oil in the first half of the 19th century), it has since become obscene. Conroy is torn between the desire to share what he loves and the desire to conserve something precious and intangible, what writer David Halberstam once called “the courtesy and manners that are critical to the texture of life in a small town.” It is a pleasure to see Conroy spread out, mid-dilemma, conscious that the truly wonderful places in the world cannot be kept for the very few, but wishing, almost guiltily, that it were not so.

*

The View From

Stalin’s Head

Stories

Aaron Hamburger

Random House: 260 pp.,

$12.95 paper

Each of the protagonists in Aaron Hamburger’s perversely funny stories in “The View From Stalin’s Head” is on the brink of self-annihilation (and for some of them, the world would be a finer place). “Some mornings I woke up and could actually feel my personality evaporate into the smog I breathed each day,” says a young English teacher, obsessed with his own gayness and Jewishness. This is a man who is clearly traveling to test both of these defining aspects of his personality and, let’s just say, he fails. But it’s so funny when he does -- choosing the biggest working-class hunk he can find to have a disastrous affair. There’s Rachel, getting thinner by the day in Prague and convinced she’ll never meet a man. She sabotages her life by meeting a non-Jewish man obsessed with two things: Judaism and his mother. Much of the dialogue is reminiscent of David Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day” -- laugh-out-loud funny. You cry, you laugh, but in the end none of these characters really had to leave home to feel tortured.

*

The Various

A Novel

Steve Augarde

David Fickling Books/Oxford:

448 pp., $16.95

A favorite genre: children sent to a magical place where they discover the other world we all know must be there. Narnia, Hogwarts, the bathhouse of the spirits in “Spirited Away” -- these are places where children discover their true power and creativity. In Steve Augarde’s “The Various,” 12-year-old Midge, daughter of a single musician mom, is sent to the West Country to summer with Uncle Brian on Mill Farm while her distracted parent goes on tour. Almost immediately, Midge feels at home. Her uncle takes time to listen, something adults in London never seemed to do. She also meets “the various”: winged horses, fairies, pixies and hunters whose countryside faces development. Already they must venture farther from the Royal Wood, a dark forest of brambles and ancient trees, to find food. Midge enters their world when she finds a white winged horse under the blades of a tractor in the old barn. She must get him back to the wood, warn the others that even more of their territory is soon to be destroyed and try to persuade her kindly uncle not to sell his land. (This book is supposed to be for young adults. This old adult couldn’t put it down.)