An understated collection that feels both timeless and prophetic.
Sixteen stories explore the shimmering and dangerous expanse between fantasy and reality.
Villages, monsters, vicious kings, witches, predictive human-behavior algorithms, and endlessly expanding houses fill the pages of A.’s short story collection. Part fable, part magical realism, and part technological dystopia (or utopia, depending on the narrator), these stories explore the real and the fantastical across past, present, and future. In the opening story, “The God in the Box,” a mysterious giant square box appears on the outskirts of a city. When the local residents, who believe a good God lives in the box, begin to fear that their desires can sway this God, they forsake the box—until a little boy makes a small but mighty decision. In “Guided,” a technological implant that flattens human emotion helps create a global “utopian socialist-anarchist-capitalist hybrid system” with two warring factions: the Guided and the UnGuided. Perhaps the strongest entry in the collection, this sharp and eerie story questions what people would be willing to give up to be able to live in a “perfect” world. Devastating and beautiful, “Für Elise” follows Elise, a talented musician, caregiver, and chronic people-pleaser as she watches her life—and all the paths she did not take. The story reminds us that “caring is not a wasted life” even as its ending offers a glimpse into a beautiful alternate ending for such a life. The collection is uneven, but the notion of the “other" is a thematic strength. There are stories where the other forces the characters to understand themselves more deeply, but there are also stories where the characters don’t realize the other is not quite what it seems until it’s too late. This collection reminds us that sometimes the other isn’t so different after all. As she balances the mythical, spiritual, and futuristic, A.’s ruminations on perception, power, technology, authenticity, authority, tradition, and community are unassumingly sharp.
An understated collection that feels both timeless and prophetic.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781961884724
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
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