[WEST STOCKBRIDGE, MA]—Berkshire-based writer Gladys Montgomery has authored two new books about architecture, which are being published this year: Storybook Cottages: America’s Carpenter Gothic Style (Rizzoli) and An Elegant Wilderness: Great Camps and Grand Lodges of the Adirondacks, 1855-1935 (Acanthus Press, in collaboration with The Adirondack Museum).

Weaving together contemporary color photography, illustrations from historic pattern books, and photographs, drawings and floor plans from the Historic American Buildings Survey, Storybook Cottages tells the story of America’s Gothic Revival and the houses trimmed with decorative “gingerbread” scrollwork, a style that we now call Carpenter Gothic.

An Elegant Wilderness, a stunningly beautiful coffee-table volume, is the first book to combine architectural, social, cultural, and environmental history with biography and brilliant black-and-white archival photographs to evoke the life of the wealthy urban elite who summered in the Adirondacks during the Gilded Age.

Montgomery, a resident of West Stockbridge, will be speaking and signing books in the area. These events include the West Stockbridge Public Library on June 24 from 7 to 9 p.m.; at the Kinderhook Group office at 10 Elm St., Stockbridge, on July 22 from 4 to 6 p.m.; and at Ventfort Hall in Lenox on August 17 at 4 p.m.

The founding editor of Berkshire Living Home + Garden, Montgomery has authored five books and more than 200 feature articles for international, national, and regional magazines, winning awards for her writing and editing. Her writing specialty has been architecture, design, historic preservation, and lifestyle topics. A former resident of Manhattan and former expatriate in Japan and the Philippines, she moved to the Berkshires from the Boston area, where she restored two historic homes. Prior to her writing career, she worked in the non-profit arts and corporate sectors, with a focus on public relations and marketing. Montgomery is currently a real estate agent with the Kinderhook Group (www.thekinderhookgroup.com); her real estate forté is architecturally distinctive properties, including historic ones, in all price ranges.

Queen by Right, Smith’s fourth historic novel about fifteenth-century Britain and the royal Plantagenet family, tells the story of Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, who was the mother of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. Smith’s three earlier novels were A Rose for the Crown, Daughter of York, and The King’s Grace. Smith takes delight in meticulous research, and even travels to the places her historic characters lived and worked so that she can describe the locations vividly and accurately. “I use the skeleton of history; then I elaborate on that with dialogue and scenes,” Smith says.

Smith specializes in strong female protagonists, and in Queen by Right (Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), her portrait of Cecily Neville fits the bill. As Smith says in a video interview on her website, www.anneeastersmith.com, she believes that Cecily and her husband, Richard, Duke of York, had one of the great love stories, which was very rare among the arranged marriages common for the aristocracy in the fifteenth century.

“In my novels, I strive to serve those readers who are looking for accuracy in historical fact,” Smith says, “and yet also engage those who are looking for a good story with strong characters, a little romance, and lots of period detail.”

Chapters Bookstore is at 78 North St. in Pittsfield, Mass. For more information, call 413.443.2665 or visit www.chapterspittsfield.com. Saturday’s event is free and open to the public; light refreshments will be served.

In her new literary thriller, A Stranger Like You (The Viking Press/Penguin Group), Elizabeth Brundage (whose two previous novels were set in Albany, N.Y., and Stockbridge, Mass.) gives us a gritty, authentic Los Angeles as the backdrop to her taut, suspenseful story. Hedda Chase is a powerful Hollywood film producer, who, intent on eschewing gratuitous violence in her movies, cancels production of a screenplay filled with the kind of brutality she finds objectionable. When the writer of the cancelled script, Hugh Waters, an insurance company employee from New Jersey, learns that Hedda Chase killed his dream, he flies to L.A. and accosts her, drugging and locking her in the trunk of her BMW—the same fate as the character in his screenplay. This well-crafted novel offers clever plotting; complex and troubling characters; and a provocative look at the depiction of violence in film and in fiction.

 
In her latest book, novelist and part-time Northampton, Mass., resident Elinor Lipman concocts a contemporary comedy of manners. The Family Man (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) revolves around Henry Archer, a gay New York City lawyer who has taken early retirement and is feeling a little lonely—until an unexpected phone call from his appalling ex-wife (a brief mistake long ago) brings his long-lost stepdaughter, Thalia, back into his life. Helping Thalia manage her complicated relationships, Henry soon realizes that his own love life is far from over. All of Lipman’s considerable skills are at work in this book: witty dialogue, engaging characters, and humorous situations. Lipman often places her characters in awkward social situations, but with charm, heart, and a measure of sly wit, she shepherds them along to a satisfying conclusion.

Dani Shapiro’s beautifully written second memoir, Devotion (HarperCollins Publishers), mines her very personal search not so much for the big answers as for the right questions. Shapiro, who lives in Litchfield County, Conn., grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home, but abandoned those rituals in college. In her forties, married and with a young son, her need to discover her true beliefs becomes compelling. She visits synagogues and affixes a mezuzah on her front door; spends weekends at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, Mass.; goes on a silent meditation retreat. There is no single epiphany, just a series of quiet realizations that, for her, aspects of Judaism, yoga, Buddhism, and meditation all have a place in her life. Shapiro’s tale of her transformative journey is moving, intimate, humorous, and honest.

A society matron schemes to have her estranged husband appear at their daughter’s wedding; a socialite awaits the reviews of her first published novel with dread; and a woman shunned by society for being a divorcé returns to New York City from her exile in Florence, Italy, only to realize that she is still an outcast.

These characters appear in the three short stories—“The Last Asset,” “Expiation,” and “Autre Temps”—included in Edith Wharton on Audio, Volume 1, the first audiobook from the Wharton Audio Project, a collaboration between Berkshire Media Artists (BMA) and The Mount Press. The selected stories were written between 1902 and 1911, when Edith Wharton, the first female author to win a Pulitzer Prize, lived at The Mount in Lenox, Mass., and all three feature characters dealing, in some way or another, with the strictures of “polite society.” 

 Wharton was known for penning “biting social satire,” says Jason Brown, who produced and directed the project at his BMA Studios in Monterey, Mass. “I wanted short stories that were written while she was at The Mount,” he adds, “and these were my favorites.”

The stories are read dramatically by Jonathan Epstein, Tod Randolph, and Tara Franklin, accomplished actors familiar to Berkshire theatergoers. In fact, all three have either acted in or read from Wharton works at The Mount.

 “The Last Asset,” the tale of an American newspaperman on assignment in Paris who is enlisted to find a missing father-of-the-bride, is read by Epstein with just the right inflection of humor. “Expiation” is read by Franklin, whose youthful voice is ideal for the story of Mrs. Fetherel, the would-be author of a scandalous exposé. And Randolph does a marvelous job with “Autre Temps,” the poignant tale of a woman whose own long-ago divorce makes her worry for her beloved daughter, about to risk her status in society.

Musical interludes buffer the excellent recordings of Wharton’s stories, which lend themselves to being read aloud, an activity often enjoyed by Wharton and her guests at The Mount. Edith Wharton on Audio, Volume 2, which features a selection of ghost stories, is due in spring 2011.

Edith Wharton on Audio Volume 1  the audio book is on three CDs; listening time is three hours and fifteen minutes. For more information, visit www.bmaaudio.com.