This year’s Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival takes place August 1 through August 2 and features a mix of fiction and nonfiction authors, including former congressmen and chefs and best-selling authors.

Chris Fischer knows Martha’s Vineyard well. The family homestead, Beetlebung Farm, is the primary subject of Mr. Fischer’s new book, The Beetlebung Farm Cookbook.

This year, the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival was blessed with perfect weather. On Saturday, it drizzled and was a fine day to be indoors, at the Harbor View, curled up with a good book and a favorite author.

Mark Leibovich’s new book This Town, a critical expose of the Washington power structure and New York Times best seller this summer, is as popular with the right as it is with the left. Or with anyone who believes that government is broken.

Steam rose from many, many mugs of coffee on Saturday morning as the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival began at the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown. More than 30 authors attended the two-day festival, participating in readings and panel discussions at the Harbor View on Saturday and on the grounds of the Chilmark Community Center on Sunday.

The book festival has been held on the Vineyard every other summer since 2005, conceived and organized by Suellen Lazarus, a seasonal resident of Chilmark.

Eric Asimov

For some it began with Go Dog Go, Busy, Busy Town or Green Eggs and Ham. The tears may have started with the dogs, Old Yeller, Sounder and Where the Red Fern Grows.

February 2013 marked the centenary of the birthof Rosa Parks, the African American seamstress from Montgomery, Ala., who became known as “the mother of the civil rights movement” after her courageous refusal to give up her seat on a public bus. The image of a tidy, genteel, quiet lady with her head held high remains emblazoned as a totemic image of the movement.

Excerpted from a letter to William Blackburn written July 23, 1949 from Valley Cottage, N.Y. Mr. Blackburn was a professor at Duke and an early mentor of William Styron’s.

Sean Wilentz is hardly your Quaaludes and vitriol music critic. That may be why the Bob Dylan in America author was commissioned to write the definitive history of one of America’s truly great record companies. Mr. Wilentz is also the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.