Deserving of a place among other modern classic writers’ memoirs like Stephen King’s On Writingand Chee’s mentor Annie...
A precise and candid set of essays from the novelist Chee (English and Creative Writing/Dartmouth Coll.; The Queen of the Night, 2016, etc.) about life, writing, and how each sustains the other.
This collection wasn’t planned as a conventional memoir. However, arranged to cover the author’s life from adolescence to the present day, it possesses a loose arc and consistent set of throughlines. One is Chee’s status as a gay Amerasian man, which has energized him as a pro–LGBT activist and liberated him as a person; the counterweights, though, are the friends lost to AIDS and the professional doors closed to him. (His first gay-themed novel had a hard time selling due to its subject matter.) Another throughline is Chee’s struggle to launch his writing career, and he’s engagingly blunt about the labor that serious writing demands and the money that’s often lacking anyway. At his most spirited, in “My Parade,” he rebuts the dismissive clichés about MFA programs and how they’re often born of a writer’s fear of confronting the emotional honesty the job requires. “The only things you must have to become a writer,” he writes, “are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.” Even Chee’s detours don’t stray far from his core concerns: working as a cater-waiter for William F. Buckley and his wife demanded emotionally balancing a certain jealousy of their lifestyle and contempt for his homophobia, while tending a rose garden in his dreary Brooklyn apartment serves as a metaphor for the ordered disorder of writing a novel. What truly unifies these pieces, though, is the author’s consistent care with words and open-hearted tone; having been through emotional and artistic wars, he’s produced a guidebook to help others survive them too.
Deserving of a place among other modern classic writers’ memoirs like Stephen King’s On Writingand Chee’s mentor Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-76452-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Erudite writing from an author struggling to find meaning through music.
An Ohio-based poet, columnist, and music critic takes the pulse of the nation while absorbing some of today’s most eclectic beats.
At first glance, discovering deep meaning in the performance of top-40 songstress Carly Rae Jepsen might seem like a tough assignment. However, Abdurraqib (The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, 2016) does more than just manage it; he dives in fully, uncovering aspects of love and adoration that are as illuminating and earnest as they are powerful and profound. If he can do that with Jepsen's pop, imagine what the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Prince, or Nina Simone might stir in him. But as iconic as those artists may be, the subjects found in these essays often serve to invoke deeper forays into the worlds surrounding the artists as much as the artists themselves. Although the author is interested in the success and appeal of The Weeknd or Chance the Rapper, he is also equally—if not more—intrigued with the sociopolitical and existential issues that they each managed to evoke in present-day America. In witnessing Zoe Saldana’s 2016 portrayal of Simone, for instance, Abdurraqib thinks back to his own childhood playing on the floor of his family home absorbing the powerful emotions caused by his mother’s 1964 recording of “Nina Simone in Concert”—and remembering the relentlessly stigmatized soul who, unlike Saldana, could not wash off her blackness at the end of the day. In listening to Springsteen, the author is reminded of the death of Michael Brown and how “the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal is coming from.” In all of Abdurraqib’s poetic essays, there is the artist, the work, the nation, and himself. The author effortlessly navigates among these many points before ultimately arriving at conclusions that are sometimes hopeful, often sorrowful, and always visceral.
Erudite writing from an author struggling to find meaning through music.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937512-65-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.
A brisk study of 20 of the Bard’s plays, focused on stripping off four centuries of overcooked analysis and tangled reinterpretations.
“I don’t really care what he might have meant, nor should you,” writes Smith (Shakespeare Studies/Oxford Univ.; Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, 2016, etc.) in the introduction to this collection. Noting the “gappy” quality of many of his plays—i.e., the dearth of stage directions, the odd tonal and plot twists—the author strives to fill those gaps not with psychological analyses but rather historical context for the ambiguities. She’s less concerned, for instance, with whether Hamlet represents the first flower of the modern mind and instead keys into how the melancholy Dane and his father share a name, making it a study of “cumulative nostalgia” and our difficulty in escaping our pasts. Falstaff’s repeated appearances in multiple plays speak to Shakespeare’s crowd-pleasing tendencies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a bawdier and darker exploration of marriage than its teen-friendly interpretations suggest. Smith’s strict-constructionist analyses of the plays can be illuminating: Her understanding of British mores and theater culture in the Elizabethan era explains why Richard III only half-heartedly abandons its charismatic title character, and she is insightful in her discussion of how Twelfth Night labors to return to heterosexual convention after introducing a host of queer tropes. Smith's Shakespeare is eminently fallible, collaborative, and innovative, deliberately warping play structures and then sorting out how much he needs to un-warp them. Yet the book is neither scholarly nor as patiently introductory as works by experts like Stephen Greenblatt. Attempts to goose the language with hipper references—Much Ado About Nothing highlights the “ ‘bros before hoes’ ethic of the military,” and Falstaff is likened to Homer Simpson—mostly fall flat.
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4854-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
