Stacked inside a greige walk-in closet were at least a dozen piles of galleys organized with Post-it notes: “Nonfiction - Need to read!” and “Upcoming/further away.” When I told her it looks like my own office, she replied that her friend Lea Carpenter had warned her when she started the podcast, “Just wait. “We just bought this house in September, fully furnished,” Owens told me earlier, which explained the dearth of bookshelves in this book podcaster’s $12.9 million house.

Owens’s dinner will be in a decidedly lower key: a gingham tablecloth, uniformed servers passing out pigs in blankets, Zibby’s kids popping in occasionally to whisper hello to novelists sipping rosé by the gently lapping pool. It’s the evening before the annual Authors Night festival (which Owens co-sponsors), when the likes of Alec Baldwin, Candace Bushnell, and Gretchen Rubin will gather to hand out their books before shimmying off to dinner parties of their own on plush, springy lawns all across the Hamptons. The dinner is for “a small crowd,” about 20 people, mostly authors whom she has interviewed on her increasingly sought-after podcast, Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.

“I just really like to make sure things are in the right places and everything is okay.” “Normally, I’m there to manage everything,” she’d whispered to me earlier while distracted by another errand - interviewing memoirist Dani Shapiro down the road at Book Hampton. She flutters around trying to decide whether to move the entire enterprise inside, into the dining room or one of two grass-cloth-wallpapered living rooms. A single dark cloud hovers over Zibby Owens’s sprawling Water Mill house, threatening to burst all over her soon-to-arrive dinner guests.

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