Well-intentioned but often thin praise pieces.
Famous writers riff on their favorite short stories.
Dubus III asked 50 working writers to write a brief essay praising two short stories. Joyce Carol Oates selects John Updike’s “A&P” and Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal,” and Paul Harding spotlights a pair of John Cheever classics: “The Swimmer” and “The Jewels of the Cabots.” While it’s pleasant enough to read seasoned writers celebrating their inspirations, the project has its shortcomings. Because Dubus invited his contemporaries to contribute, the selections tend to gravitate to writers in the New Yorker mold from the second half of the 20th century. Selections are dominated by the likes of Raymond Carver (cited three times), Russell Banks, Jamaica Kincaid, and so on. Many contributors also have their own stories praised by others—Michael Cunningham, Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Philips, Stuart Dybek, Ron Carlson, and more—which exacerbates the insular vibe. The better pieces break free from either effusions of praise or workshop analysis and make more adventurous selections or statements. Lois Lowry’s commentary on Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” is a pathway for a discussion of her own experience with grief; Dagoberto Gilb’s piece on Juan Rulfo and Tomás Rivera is both an appreciation and a critique of the American literary canon; Phil Klay opens his piece on Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” by recalling a near-death experience; and Cunningham blends an essay on the limits of teaching fiction writing with a lucid study of James Joyce’s “The Dead” and its iconic ending, “one of the greatest paragraphs produced by human hand.” Some of the authors share writing prompts, suggesting this book is intended as a teaching tool; in most cases here, though, it may be enough to take their recommendations on faith and go directly to the stories themselves. Other contributors include T.C. Boyle, Meg Wolitzer, Richard Russo, Lauren Groff, Ann Beattie, and Junot Díaz.
Well-intentioned but often thin praise pieces.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781567927696
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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