A mixed bag, but with many insights and small pleasures.
An overstuffed literary anthology drawn from the pages of two journals out of the University of Oklahoma.
The title comes from Octavio Paz, one of hundreds of writers published since 1927 by the literary journals Books Abroad and its successor, World Literature Today. The occasion of Paz’s sonorous phrase honors the parent publication, which he likened, on receiving its Neustadt Prize, to a compass that guided him to writers he would likely never have discovered; further, Paz pays homage to the plurality and universality that literature embraces in “acknowledging…the admirable diversity of man and his works.” This is a diverse gathering, to be sure, containing work by classic authors (Musil, Neruda, Mann) and modern epigone (Lahiri, Gurnah, Hamid) in celebration of language, books, and literature. Some of the pieces, particularly the “first takes” on classic works, are too short and sometimes slight to carry much weight: likening The Savage Detectives in passing to One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, says little about either Bolaño or García Márquez. Fortunately, much else is meatier: a splendid poem by Czeslaw Milosz (“Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot”) here, a thoughtful consideration of translation and cultural translocation by Mojave writer Natalie Diaz (“It is a gift to have a language that English is too small for, since I have a life that English thinks is small”) there; Margarita Engle’s insistence that, our freedoms of thought and writing being muscles, “if we don’t use them, they will atrophy, and we won’t be able to defend children against tyranny” buttressing Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare’s view that belief in literature means knowing that “the government which dominates you…[and] tyranny itself are a passing nightmare, dead matter, compared to the great order of which you have become initiated as a member.” And there it is: literature as news that stays news, that because timeless couldn’t be more timely.
A mixed bag, but with many insights and small pleasures.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781632064134
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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