Arts a la Carte, a new children’s arts discussion series at the Featherstone Center for the Arts, will kick off this Thursday with a bang: a Molly Bang, that is.

Island readers anticipated Philip Craig’s annual mystery novels like their first summer swim. The author died this year, leaving one last novel finished. Here is an exclusive excerpt from that book, Vineyard Chill, printed with permission from Scribner.

It was a bright, snowless mid-January day, chilly but not cold, Just right for a drive on the Chappy beaches. We could enjoy the ride and bring back several big, industrial-strength trash bags full of seaweed for the garden. Two good reasons to go. So we went.

In this serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after many years in Manhattan to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Through Mott (Pequot’s general manager) she’s met Quincas (a Brazilian laborer) and the rest of Pequot’s staff. Uncle Abe has an intense loathing of Richard Moby, the CEO of Broadway, an off-Island landscaping business.

Alan M. Dershowitz will speak about his latest book, Is There a Right to Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11, at the Chilmark Public Library on Wednesday, July 9, at 5:30 p.m.

The African Artists’ Community Development project will be selling crafts from Ghana, Niger, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe on Tuesday, July 8, at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury from 5 to 9 p.m. Items for sale include baskets, woven grass ceremonial cloth, Tuareg silver jewelry, malachite jewelry, carved wooden bowls and salad servers, animal and human sculpture, brilliant khanga printed cloth and more.

The Island Community Chorus will open the 2008 season of programs at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs with a concert at 8 p.m. this Saturday, July 5.

The chorus of more than 100 voices, under the direction of Peter Boak and accompanied by L. Garrett Brown at the Tabernacle’s nine-foot Steinway piano, will present a program of music designed for the holiday weekend, music whose variety pays tribute to the richness of the American experience.