Edward Dillon doesn’t exist. Longtime readers of the Vineyard Gazette may recall reading about Mr. Dillon’s antics in the West Chop column during the summer of 1977. The column, written by then 12-year-old Amor Towles, reported the comings and goings within the close-knit community. Yet unbeknownst to most readers, the man by the name of Edward Dillon, mentioned in columns throughout the summer, was fictional.

Like most of us, Steven Rattner knew little about the automobile industry when in early 2009 he accepted the unenviable task of helping craft a government rescue plan for Detroit’s automakers.

But unlike most of us, Mr. Rattner knew more than a little about finance and profitable companies. And as President Obama’s former “car czar,” he has produced a readable book about the experience in Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry.

Pitchapalooza is coming to Martha’s Vineyard, so time to dust off your pitching chops. But here’s the catch. You will have but just one minute to talk.

The pitch, so to speak, is as follows. Twenty writers will be selected at random from the audience. Each person picked gets sixty seconds to convince the judges of the worthiness of his book idea. At the end of the pitching a winner will be announced. The prize? An introduction to an agent or publisher appropriate for his or her book.

To launch the publication of The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translator Robert Bagg will speak at the West Tisbury library on Wednesday, July 27 from 5 to 6 p.m.

The Emperor of All Maladies is a billed as a biography of cancer and author Siddhartha Mukherjee treats his subject with all the reverence of a living subject.

“Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better,” he writes. “They are better versions of ourselves.”

LIPMAN PIKE: America’s First Home Run King . By Richard Michelson . Sleeping Bear Press. 32 pages, photographs. $16.95.

Governor Deval Patrick is coming to the Island but this is not just another baby-kissing tour. On Saturday, July 23, he will be reading from and discussing his new memoir, A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life.

Mr. Patrick was born in Chicago in 1956 and after junior high school he won a scholarship to attend Milton Academy in Massachusetts. From there it was on to Harvard as an undergraduate and for law school. In 2007 he became the first African American Governor of Massachusetts and was reelected last year.

In the early 1970s, when the tide of summer residents would go out in September, there were always young people who didn’t want to leave the Vineyard — and they didn’t have to, because there was no particular place they planned to go. Land was still relatively affordable, or their families had land, and they built themselves homes back in the woods, had kids, a few animals and a garden, and patched together a living with the usual Vineyard hodgepodge of work or self-employment.

Eric Metaxas is the New York Times bestselling author of Bonhoeffer: Prophet, Martyr, Spy and Amazing Grace and William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. He is also a writer for Veggie Tales, a children’s book and TV series that is both funny and grounded in themes of faith.

What can we say, the man has range.

The poem begins with the routine event of chopping parsley, a serious and yet absurd musing on a nursery rhyme known to all — three blind mice — and quickly spins into a quiet meditation on the sneaking cynicism that prevents us from feeling, and then, in shame, makes us feel all the more.