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SHORELINE

A dazzling memoir that artfully renders the importance of connection across time and space.

A memoir in essays about making connections across great distances.

Nayman, a clinical psychologist and a fiction and nonfiction writer, brings her storytelling skills to bear in her poignant memoir. Unfolding across standalone chapters, the book explores connections with lost friends, her children, and her mother, who continues to be a complicated character in the author’s life even years after her death. “To live is to grieve,” Nayman writes, ruminating on the deaths of close friends and both of her parents, as well as imagining the impact her own future passing will one day have on her children: “Shorelines never only offer welcome; they’re ever hearkening departure.” Born in South Africa, raised in Australia, and now living in New York, Nayman is no stranger to departure, yet her sense of connection with place and people remains rich. Nayman also returns to her Jewish heritage, inspiring thoughtful interactions with writers such as Joseph Roth and with ideas like postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to describe how trauma transmits between generations. Through the exploration of Hirsh’s idea, Nayman examines her relationship with her mother in a brilliant chapter that straddles fiction and nonfiction. In artful prose and well-crafted stories about the different relationships with places and people that she has held throughout her life, Nayman shows how “full-bodied relationships are like works of art, defined by hiddenness and shadow, by the bits of emptiness and silence, by the unsayable.”

A dazzling memoir that artfully renders the importance of connection across time and space.

Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2024

ISBN: 9781771839167

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Guernica Editions

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024

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A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A CARTOON COLLECTION

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

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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

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LIFEFORM

Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving.

An actor and comedian tells the story of her journey from being an unpaired “animal” to a “new mammal mother” in love.

After Slate completed her first book, “the issue of finding a partner…never rested and never allowed rest for [her] either.” Senses heightened, she had stepped into her most animal self and was on a quest to “fulfill [her] mammal instincts.” Loneliness and emotional vulnerability made her seek connection with neighborhood dogs and insights from books that promised to bring soulmates. When love did finally find her, the anxiety that he would reject her for being herself and “drinking tequila on a Saturday afternoon…then [having] a bath with my friend” was intense. After the pair became a couple and Slate became pregnant with the baby she called “the lifeform,” her neuroses—which the author mocks through an imaginary session with a psychologist—went into overdrive. Yet even as she wrestled with her fears, Slate also discovered that the body that was so often a “bay of doubt” was also becoming a “harbor of well-being” for the life-form to which she was attached. Then, during a time of “plague and disruption,” the author “exploded [her] vagina” to give birth, becoming not only a mother, but a “mammal with a soul that [was] born anew every day.” Though still haunted by a “purple-dark hole marking me in the afternoons,” Slate had become secure enough in the “nest” she had built for herself to see the hole more as a “bluish egg-thing” portending possibility. At times whimsical in its flights of fancy and always surprising in the moments of lyrical grace it offers, Slate’s book celebrates the transformative power of surrendering to love and life.

Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024

ISBN: 9780316263931

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024

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