A moving tribute to the dogs in our lives, and the good fortune of their companionship.
A collection of essays, brimming with love and sorrow, on our best friends.
The best dog in the world, of course, is yours. As editor Hoffman recounts in her introduction, hers was a German shepherd named Houdini that possessed all the magic his name implied, and though he didn’t like the man who would become her husband, and later her ex-husband (“He was a good judge of character”), Houdini was a devoted companion to the rest of the household. “If you’re very lucky you may be honored to know a once-in-a-lifetime dog,” she concludes. That’s just right, and other contributors to this volume echo the sentiment in different ways. Writes novelist Emily Henry, “We are so fucking lucky to get to love someone so much that it tears a hole in the world when they’re gone.” That’s just right, too, but there’s little pathos here: The contributors are clear-eyed about what Dame Rebecca West called dogs’ one flaw, namely that they die. Of course, people do too, and one standout in this collection is Isabel Allende’s reminiscence of a normally quiet dog that would go ape whenever the household ghost—naturally, she named her home House of the Spirits—made an appearance. In another affecting piece, Paul Yoon laments the coming day when his beloved dog will no longer walk the earth, and he fears that the day will come after that when “I will begin to erase Oscar, that I will no longer remember the feel of him—his smell, his voice—no longer remember what it was I used to imagine about him as he lay beside me.” The conclusion to these varied pieces, in as many words, is fitting: We are lucky to have the time we do with our dogs, and we wouldn’t trade a moment of it.
A moving tribute to the dogs in our lives, and the good fortune of their companionship.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781668209028
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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