Letters cohere into a multifaceted portrait of a man and his times.
The journeys of a Black literary modernist.
Claude McKay (1889-1948) is remembered for his poetry, journalism, memoirs, and fiction. His output also includes a prolific crop of letters. His correspondents were prominent intellectuals, artists, and activists such as Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, H.L. Mencken, Nancy Cunard, and Max Eastman, among many others. From widely dispersed archival sources, literary scholars Hefner and Holcomb have gathered McKay’s letters from 1916 to 1934, years he spent traveling in the Soviet Union, Europe, and North Africa. In a brief biographical summary sent to literary agent William A. Bradley, McKay wrote that he was born in Jamaica, came to the U.S. in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute, and left after six months, when he enrolled at Kansas State College. In 1914, he made his way to New York, where he ran a cabaret and, when that failed, took on odd jobs. Money troubles recur in his letters—sometimes he doesn’t eat for days—as does alienation. McKay, the editors assert, felt like an “outsider to national and cultural ideologies,” a severe critic of capitalism and “Imperial abomination.” Black, queer, politically radical, he “spent most of his life searching for what ‘home’ meant to him.” The letters reveal an intense, uncompromising man: “Life fascinates me in its passions,” he wrote to writer and socialist Eastman, a close friend. They reveal romantic and sexual liaisons, friendships made and broken, and his take on national character—he finds Russians warm-hearted and Arabs “curious and eager like keen knife blades.” Most definitely, his literary work consumes him. Judiciously annotated, introduced by a detailed biographical essay, and appended with a glossary of names, the collection will be an indispensable source for readers and researchers.
Letters cohere into a multifaceted portrait of a man and his times.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780300276473
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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