A scintillating collection, full of imaginative stories and strong, vivid writing.
Violent dads, a lovelorn hedgehog, and a teenage grim reaper are among the engrossing figures showcased in this anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays.
Editors Landfield and Ellerhoff have gathered contributions from 27 authors, many of them current or former clerks at Tsunami Books in Eugene, Oregon. Their works often feature intense regional flavor—Eugene’s blend of college-town hippie and rural orneriness—along with muscular language, fantasy, and genre forms with offbeat twists. Among the many standout pieces, Meli Hull’s essay “Non-Words” takes a delightful romp through her baby’s language acquisition. (“Additions to our lexicon include…asking her if she wants to ‘fly high in the sky’ and then doing a cheerleading count-off of ‘one-two, down-UP!’ as I lift her into the air. She squeals and giggles and opens her round mouth in a big grin.”) Matthew Dickman’s story “Leveling Up” imagines Death as a 15-year-old punk playing Ms. Pacman at a video arcade in prose that mixes cosmic grandiosity with adolescent pique. (“I was in Pompeii, fucking Pompeii, and I can’t get this stupid asshole on the screen to move fast enough not to get eaten by fucking ghosts.”) And Ellerhoff’s adult fable “The Fox and the Hedgehog” has the former consoling the latter when he’s dumped by the Solar Witch in favor of an old flame in a gush of bawdy Irish wisdom. (“That witch already had the big story’f her life goin on before ya showed up….Chapter Fifty-Nine: The Hedgehog Arrives. Chapter Sixty: Feckface Returns ’n’ Gives It to Her in the Arse Again.”) The series opener’s excellent poetry includes Erik Muller’s cycle “A Boy’s Eyes,” a plangent exploration of a father’s brutality told in grim language (“It is not clear why he / strikes our mother. Something snarls, / something drives the Old Man. / Later she bows her head / over a bucket so she doesn’t / bleed onto what she has to clean”). And Jenny Root’s “That Which Lies Beside the Slough” is a searing evocation of a homeless camp. (“The blankets that lay heaped beneath the bridge covered them / head to toe. / The blankets, which once lay folded upon a quiet shelf, trembled in / the scolding wind.”) The result is an enthralling read with literary flair and lots of heart.
A scintillating collection, full of imaginative stories and strong, vivid writing.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798988151203
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Tsunami Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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