Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search For Jewish Cooking In France by Joan Nathan of Washington, D.C., and Chilmark, is a delectable-looking cookbook with hundreds of delicious recipes. And, best of all, since many of them come from the hot climates of southern France and North Africa, you’re sure to be able to find in it just what you want to serve at a mid-summer Island dinner party.

Change Is Coming

West Tisbury summer resident Jill Shaw Ruddock’s new best-selling book The Second Half of Your Life is part self-help book, part scientific treatise. It takes readers into the world of menopause and afterwards and argues successfully, in case anyone actually wondered, that there is indeed life after “the change.” But see for yourself.

By JULIAN WISE

Chris Adrian is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology. He is also a recent graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. So he’s well-versed in tragic loss and grief, as well as the more abstract issues of immortality and the meaning of life. In his newest novel, The Great Night, he mixes all of these ingredients together and bakes them in an oven fueled by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The result is an exquisitely heart-breaking novel, sprinkled with dark comedy, whimsy and sex.

Author Bill Sargent will discuss his new book, The Well from Hell: The BP Oil Spill and the Endurance of Big Oil, at the Chilmark Public Library on Wednesday, August 17, at 5:30 p.m.

Writers’ Group Unveiled

On Sunday evenings for the last several years a group of writers has been gathering at the Cleaveland House in West Tisbury, the home of mystery writer Cynthia Riggs. The writers meet to share their work and help critique and inspire each other while traveling down that very solitary road of the creative process.

When Elizabeth Murray was 16 years old, she had already seen far too much of the unforgiving side of life, and she had begun to ask herself if what she knew was all there was. What she knew was that she’d recently buried her mother, who died of AIDS, in a donated pine box with her name misspelled on it. Mr. Murray’s addict father, who was suffering from AIDS himself in a homeless shelter elsewhere in New York city, could not attend. Ms. Murray herself had dropped out of high school and was homeless.

Author Winslow Myers will present Living Beyond War, sharing his beliefs and commitment to end war, on Sunday, May 22, at 5 p.m. at the Unitarian-Universalist Society Chapel at 238 Main street in Vineyard Haven.

The organization called Beyond War has been working for 25 years to change thinking about war. During the Cold War, teams of high level scientists from the then Soviet Union and the U.S. wrote a book together about the dangers of accidental nuclear war.

Pearl Buck Returns

Once the weather turns warmer and the grey, spring skies blow blue and clear the Vineyard beckons to one and all. Time and the grave cannot even thwart the faithful. Pearl Buck is headed our way.

That’s right, on June 1 at 7 p.m. Ms. Buck will be reading from her short story collection East and West at the Vineyard Haven Public Library. Okay, the legendary author of The Good Earth may bear a resemblance to the actress Diane Quaid, but the words will be her own.

The Zen of Award Winning

The lavish book of photography and essays, Martha’s Vineyard – Now & Zen, has been selected the bronze medal winner of the 2011 Indie Excellence Award in the category of Northeast Regional Publications.

This, the book’s second national award, celebrates the highest achievements in independent press and self-publishing.