A well-curated set of considerations of an artist in all his diverse stages.
Critical essays on one of popular music’s most slippery songwriters.
Bob Dylan has nothing on Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) when it comes to cryptic musical personas. He was a successful singer-songwriter but came to it late, almost casually, after establishing himself as a poet and novelist in his native Canada. He wrote songs steeped in religious imagery—“Hallelujah” most famously—but kept his own faith vague. Though he was embraced by the counterculture, he had a nihilistic streak and was, as one writer here notes, “a long-standing member of the National Rifle Association.” The essays Shumway collects don’t pretend to make a coherent portrait—except, perhaps, as a man who tried to wriggle out of every attempt to categorize him. A trio of essays discuss his uneasy relationship with ’60s folkies like Dylan, ’70s singer-songwriters, and ’80s rock acts. (Eric Weisbard delivers a particularly thoughtful piece on Cohen’s ’90s revival, stoked by his music’s appearances in films like Pump Up the Volume.) Cohen songs are less sung than incanted, which leads many to dismiss them as simple; Alan Light’s appreciation of Cohen’s gift for melody offers an elegant, well-researched counterpoint. Numerous pieces touch on his uneasy relationship with the spotlight; his touring in his later years was less about ego than a desperate need for cash after a manager embezzled his funds. Some of the pieces have a strong whiff of academia about them, including explorations of his documentary appearances, “Hallelujah” covers, and his songs’ relationship to Christian and Jewish musical traditions. But even at its wonkiest, the book feels celebratory toward Cohen, suggesting that his music and life offer rich material for cultural scholars. The closing essay, an overview of Cohen’s archives, offers a glimpse into the mass of notebooks, scraps of lyrics, and ephemera that still await the eager Cohen researcher.
A well-curated set of considerations of an artist in all his diverse stages.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9781009350594
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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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