Best suited for Katchor’s fans, of which there are many.
A collection of elegiac, dystopian comic strips from a much-lauded artist.
A woman with a rooftop garden slowly poisons her wealthy customers so that their worsening health convinces them to buy more vegetables. A man finds a room key on the street and tries to return it to the Hotel Sandshoe, where the clerk explains that they now use disposable plastic cards because keys carry the emotional detritus of a room’s previous inhabitants. Katchor is an archivist of urban spaces and the people who inhabit them, and these scenarios capture the spirit of this comic. The strip is set in a crowded metropolis that looks a lot like New York in the 20th century but seems to be a vision of the not-too-distant future. It’s a world in which status symbols include manure trenches in living rooms and carefully engineered apples, a world in which the very rich live as nomads to avoid property taxes and the poor pay each other in salad greens and pepperoni. Like Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and Bill Griffith, Katchor started his career just as alternative weeklies were taking off in cities around the country and artists like Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware were reinventing indie comics. In fact, Katchor is still best known for Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, a comic that ran from 1988 to 1998. These days, he’s more a scholar than a creator of comics. He teaches at the Parsons School of Design and leads the long-running New York Comics & Picture-stories Symposium. He started writing and drawing the strip collected here in 2000, just as the internet was decimating the free weekly environment. Despite the age of these panels, Katchor’s critique of late capitalism is still relevant, even if his brand of absurdism no longer feels countercultural. As is generally the case with comic strips, this one is best enjoyed in its native format and original cadence. The panels don’t cohere into a single compelling narrative and consuming them all at once flattens their effect.
Best suited for Katchor’s fans, of which there are many.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780307906915
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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