Probing, realistic stories of aging, learning, failing, and growing.
Polf tracks moments of personal change in this collection of literary short fiction.
A woman hires a Romanian caretaker for her mother, who is slipping into dementia, only to become jealous of the bond her mother forms with the charismatic immigrant. A man moves to 1960s San Francisco to become a writer and takes a job at the city zoo, which leads to a standoff between his primary literary (and romantic) rival and a pair of lions. A nervous boy spends an initiatory night hanging out with older teens, drinking booze and siphoning gasoline. (“He held the other end of the hose to his mouth with his thumb an inch from the end, just like he had learned, and began to suck, tentatively at first, then with more confidence. He could feel pressure at the other end of the hose; that should mean the gasoline was coming.”) A man inadvertently causes a car accident by stepping off a curb, though in the aftermath he can’t get anyone to appreciate the guilt he feels. Across 15 stories, Polf dramatizes everyday moments of crisis and transition, from a broken toilet that needs a plumber to a rainstorm that requires a mom to pick her son up from school. The author’s prose elevates the often-mundane problems in the stories to dramatic—and sometimes comedic—heights. Here, the man who causes the accident grasps for cosmological metaphors to explain it: “If he hadn’t stepped off the curb at precisely that moment, Miriam would have either already passed by or would not yet have arrived…It could be explained only in cosmic terms, Marlowe concluded, like the random chance of a particle splitting an atom and the ensuing explosion devastating everything.” Not every piece lands, and many of the tales would be improved if they pushed a bit deeper into their characters’ crises. The worlds are always richly drawn, however, and Polf proves himself a capable recorder of the human psyche.
Probing, realistic stories of aging, learning, failing, and growing.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798891323377
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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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