This rediscovered collection feels as clear and colorful as if it had been written today.
Three novellas worth resurrecting.
In recent years, A Public Space Books has reintroduced the works of the undeservedly overlooked Howland (1937-2017), publishing a collection of her stories, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and W-3, a 1974 memoir of her time in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. Now the imprint has republished, with a new introduction by author Rumaan Alam, this slim volume of three novellas, which Howland originally released in 1983—the year before she won a MacArthur Fellowship and then, presumably overcome by the pressure of heightened expectations, stopped publishing. This is another unburied treasure, with Howland’s glimmering talent again on full display. Each story showcases the author’s intelligence, insightfulness, and incomparable eye for illuminating detail and ear for captivating dialogue as well as her ability to evoke a specific place and time (often gritty midcentury Chicago and its environs) and the emotional complexities of close relationships (family and otherwise). In Birds of a Feather, Howland’s young female narrator quietly comes of age amid the cacophony and oblique warmth of her father’s loud Jewish family, “the big brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels.” The Old Wheeze focuses on the events of a single snowy Chicago night following a divorced young mother’s date with an admired older man and captures the differing perspectives of the mother, her elderly babysitter, her nursery-school-age son, and her lover. In the third and final novella, The Life You Gave Me, a daughter reckons with her complicated relationship with her father as she is summoned to the hospital to visit him on two separate occasions. “My father’s size and strength were more than physical. Mental, temperamental. Character traits. Mind Over Matter was his motto….To see him brought down, laid low, damaged, hurting, like any other injured creature—was to see him disgraced,” Howland writes. “All of which is not to say that my father was ever a simple man. Only that he didn’t know his own strength. But I did.” Howland, too, may not have understood the strength of her own writing. But now, thanks to the reissuing of these and other stories, we do.
This rediscovered collection feels as clear and colorful as if it had been written today.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9982675-6-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: A Public Space Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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