The Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival celebrated its return to the Island for the sixth time this weekend. The festival featured a wide range of writers talking about their craft with eager readers who filled tents on the grounds of the Chilmark Community Center and a room at the Harbor View Hotel.

Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, warned more than 200 people gathered at the Hebrew center last week about “a flight from conversation” in favor of texting and email, and a resulting decline in our capacity for non-digital communication.

Benito Mussolini is long gone, but the institution that helped bring him and keep him in power may not be, according to a new Pulitzer Prize winning book by historian and Brown University professor David Kertzer.

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates headlines a sold-out public discussion Friday that explores the idea of a post-racial America. The discussion kicks off the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, which runs Saturday and Sunday in Edgartown and Chilmark.

What’s for dinner? That’s the question the four Pollan family women kept finding themselves asking one another. The Pollan Family Table, written by Corky Pollan and her daughters Lori, Tracy and Dana, was the answer.

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, released last year to wide acclaim, is Mr. Hobbs’s memorial to his Yale roommate Robert Peace's life, telling the story from birth to death in obsessive detail and a clear, heartfelt narrative.