Shimmering prose and critical acumen on display in an eclectic collection.
A collection that shows Beattie “moonlighting as a nonfiction writer.”
In this entry in the publisher’s Nonpareil series, acclaimed novelist and short story writer Beattie offers a series of essays on literature, art, and photography. The author is an accomplished essayist with an elegant, precise writing style. Peter Taylor’s short stories “deepen, brushstroke by brushstroke, by gradual layering,” their surfaces “no more to be trusted than the first ice on a lake.” An Alice Munro story is “always a tactile experience,” but “beware the convenient cliché.” Andre Dubus is “one of the best American short story writers ever.” Beattie is also amazed by the novels of her friend David Markson, many of which are “spoken of as representing a leap forward for American literature.” In a lecture scrutinizing John Updike’s use of language, she writes, “I am in awe of what he can conjure up with a sentence or, at other times, a word.” Beattie also writes about her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, whose art is “painted so as to keep the eye in motion.” He’s active as he paints, while Beattie is silent and stoic while at work “to better encourage or trick the character into coming out of hiding.” In “The Distillation of Lavender,” the author lovingly profiles the photographer Jayne Hinds Bidaut’s tintypes—“Reverent. Fragile,” like “lyrical poems.” Beattie’s charming portrait of Grant Wood’s Iowa and his American Gothic is spot-on. She ponders tone in a piece on Georgia Sheron’s “extraordinary” photographs and is mesmerized by Trisha Orr’s unique paintings of antique pitchers and jars “spilling forth intricate flowers spun together as if contained within a painterly spiderweb.” Joel Meyerowitz’s “glorious” photographs of Cape Cod “open us to the exhilaration of feeling something that we thought we knew, only to have it reappear as something infinitely more complex and more beautiful.”
Shimmering prose and critical acumen on display in an eclectic collection.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-56792-752-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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