Reality bites in these odd portraits of people unmoored by their own sense of how things work.
A disastrous film festival paired with an all-encompassing virtual reality game offers more philosophical gymnastics from Aira.
This slim volume by the ever-prolific Aira collects two novellas, distinct in style and character, that lean into the author’s dark humor a little more than usual. The opener, Festival, is an uncomfortably cringe-laden comedy of errors. It concerns an independent film festival in an unnamed country, focused on its guest of honor and the mundane chaos introduced by his decidedly unwelcome guest. Readers are meant to think the Belgian film director Alec Steryx is Aira’s main subject—he’s come by invitation to chair the contest’s Grand Jury, premiere his latest esoteric science fiction film, and celebrate his body of work. But Aira cleverly slips in two wrenches: the first and most divisive is the director’s elderly, half-blind, and bad-tempered mother, who proceeds to turn the carefully curated event into a rolling logistical disaster; the second is where the story lives, in the head of Perla Sobietsky, the festival’s fiercely competitive organizer and author of a book about Steryx. While the dichotomy between Perla’s snobbishness and her charge’s unapologetically bad behavior is jarring, it’s also a funny and unpredictable way for Aira to talk about fame and perception. Meanwhile, in Game of the Worlds, a different kind of alienation comes via a virtual reality game in which children vaporize intelligent civilizations on a daily basis. Aira claims with a straight face that these are real worlds, in the manner of Ender’s Game, facing down “a gaggle of brats—whose prey surely didn’t suspect as much—with nothing better or more constructive to do with their afternoons.” Parenthood and generational angst often catalyze cliches, but here they enable Aira to talk about technology and disconnection in a way that’s both biting yet somehow full of affection for our confusing, complicated world.
Reality bites in these odd portraits of people unmoored by their own sense of how things work.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780811237307
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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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