2 Books With Celebrity Cameos

Dear readers,

To live in this city is sometimes to be subject to random, unheralded encounters with the great and the good: a sitcom star fumbling for her MetroCard; a famously misanthropic novelist, happy as a clam in the stands at a Yankees game; a disgraced former governor looking entirely too unbothered at the bagel store.

A true New Yorker, of course, metabolizes these moments and moves on, cool cucumbers in the face of all but the most outrageous disruptions (a professional sports rival, maybe, or an actual Beatle). Still, I never get tired of the low-wattage zing those run-ins can add to a routine and colorless day, like finding a flamingo on the subway.

In literature, as in life, a clever writer can do the same, taking real historical figures of some renown — the kind whose main-character energy usually fills a room — and weaving them neatly into someone else’s story.

Though they hail from wildly different genres, identities and points of view, both books here approach their famous-person cameos with satisfying restraint: just a few flamingo feathers, judiciously used.

—Leah