If you’ve ever watched Larry David’s hilarious HBO sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm, you’ll know the last person you’d want giving you a ride on Island roads is Mr. David himself. The whole gist of each of his episodes is, “I work hard at being unlikable.” Nonetheless, when Paul Samuel Dolman spent a recent summer rambling around our shores, a nondescript car slowed down, an older, bald guy with sunglasses peered out and asked if he needed a lift. As an after-thought he said, “You’re not a serial killer or something?” Hitchhiking with Larry David (South Beach Publishing, $16.99) is an engaging, witty romp from the first page to the last.

Not since Portnoy’s Complaint has there been such a poignantly dysfunctional family as Mr. Dolman’s parents in their tiny Island cabin in an undisclosed part of the woods. Their comfort zone extends from the refrigerator, where you’ll learn from a printout that if it’s Monday it’s eggs and Tuesday it’s bagels, to the television set which is perpetually turned on and, well, worshipped. Mom is welcoming but unwilling to vary her routine even to take a walk, and Dad is outright rejecting: “He only has the social energy to be nice to humans for about 10 minutes a day. This allotment of pleasantries is usually exhausted at the supermarket or on the phone with a customer service representative.”

The main sorrow for the autobiographer, however, is that the love of his life has left him, and it’s pretty much his fault; he has little knack for intimacy. So now in his 48th year, he goes looking for meaning along Island roads, and finds synchronicity in his constant hookups with Larry David. What the famous comedian thinks of the ubiquitous hitchhiker is harder to fathom. You might suppose a celebrity who is as neurotic and, by his own accounts, rude as Larry David would turn on him, “What? Are you stalking me?” But he too apparently finds the repetition similar to daily sprinkles of fairy dust.

After all, Paul Samuel Dolman turns out not to be a serial killer and for someone with those credentials, happy endings — or happy pause points — are always possible.

Linda Levy, health author, a columnist and features writer who lives in New Jersey and has close ties to the Vineyard, has produced the novel that represents 21 years of hard typing. And thinking. A Kingdom of Madness (Xlibris, $15.99 softcover; $22.99 hardcover) begins in tragedy. Spec Davis as a young man goes looking for his dad, a respected Philadelphia doctor who abandoned his four motherless children when Spec was six years old. Finding the deserter produces no joy, no hope, no closure, and Spec spirals into a long drunk-a-logue of rage and insanity. Ms. Levy is an able storyteller and her compassion for the characters, for human frailty, and the longing for redemption comes through loud and clear.

A few years ago, longtime Islander, shipyard-owner and avid sailor, Thomas Hale, was shown a monograph, actually a fragment from a journal written circa 1603. A gripping tale emerges about the passage of seven or eight English sailors, a captain named Timothy Reston, a square-rigger named the Nancy and a harrowing ride from Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard. In a trip that we’ve come to accept as a choice between a snooze in the truck or a cup of clam chowder on the mezzanine deck, the crew of the Nancy encountered bad weather “as to cause a man to think it was rooted there by Heavenly Judgment.” Soon after “our bark was staggering in the short shallow seas and we plunged on Fearful of Destruction on the rocky shores ahead.” The sailors stored their salted cod on Martha’s Isle — now that clears up the answer to an age-old tourist question! — and made vast repairs on the vessel before braving the Atlantic back to England. In his self-published and handsomely bound Satan’s Peril ($20 at Island book stores), Mr. Hale provides trenchant research into the maritime particulars of early 17th century England and the New World, Captain Reston’s family tree in Dorsetshire, and what this early fishing excursion tells us about the Cape and Islands in pre-(white) settlement days. And we thought we only went back to 1620!

Edgartown resident Donna Paulson contributed one of the 101 inspirational stories for the latest edition of Chicken soup for the Soul, A Book of Miracles (Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, $14.95). For those who’ve come to know and love the series, you’re aware that you keep your latest edition close at hand, and grab a story at a time, none of them more than three or four pages long. Ms. Paulson’s account is entitled The Little Lamb (page 19), and revolves around a day in the life of a hardscrabble Vineyard mom, single, with four children to house and feed. She comes across the famous line from Isaiah 40:11: “He tends his flock like a shepherd; he gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart.” Later in the day, Ms. Paulson encounters a pleasantly surprising recreation of the biblical passage on the sands of State Beach. We can all relate.

Architect, poet and multi-generational Islander Joe Eldredge takes on the rhyming iambics of limerick poetry originating on the Emerald Isle in the 1700s, and he applies them to all things Vineyard. The Lead Balloon (Humility Press, $15) gives us such saucy lines as A lady at Beetlebung Corner,/ with no one near to warn her, / framed her cleavage / with skimpy leafage, / and nothing more to adorn her.” The point of the limerick has always been to drape with wit and rhyme a nougat of mischief, although no one has ever exceeded the gross-out level of “There once was a man from Nantucket.” For several centuries, ribald dinners have featured the great wits of the age duking it out with limericks, some of them concocted on the spot. Now that rappers have reinvented the form with microphones, beatboxes and plenty of gold jewelry, the lyrics still mostly rhyme, but wit has mostly fled. Meanwhile Mr. Eldredge keeps the salty old formula alive, and it’s a joy to see what words he manages to rhyme with Menemsha, Dogfish Bar, Mytoi and East Chop (would you ever have thought of agitprop?)