A collection that revels in its quirks, smart and sensitive in equal measure.
A clutch of stories from Pulitzer finalist Park (Same Bed Different Dreams, 2023, etc.), heavy on the literary gamesmanship.
Park’s first collection recalls the offbeat works of 1960s postmodern stylists like Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, though in Park’s case the subject matter is more contemporary. “The Wife on Ambien” exploits the sleep drug’s reputation for inducing odd thoughts and behavior. (“The wife on Ambien hails Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks.”) In “Eat Pray Click,” a hacker devises a Kindle that can shuffle the texts of multiple books into one e-book, making for a weird but potentially profound reading experience. “Slide To Unlock” satirizes password prompts (“First time you had sex and did it count. Day, month, year. The full year or just the last two digits?”), and “Weird Menace” sends up the meandering chatter of the DVD bonus commentary. But Park isn’t just playing with unusual premises for their own sake—he’s looking for the ways that human idiosyncrasies manage to poke up to the surface even while technology tries to keep us tidy and algorithm friendly. (The actress in “Weird Menace” gets increasingly boozy and dismissive of the producer’s stay-on-topic prompts.) There’s more conventional short-story fare, at least by Park’s standards: “Machine City” concerns a guerrilla film production in a dingy college library space, “Watch Your Step” is an espionage yarn, and “Thought and Memory” concerns a successful writer ironically struggling to communicate. Not every story lands—the title story and “An Accurate Account” are woolly pomo sketches—but in most cases Park writes with an open-mindedness that suggests our every device can be mined for intelligent fiction.
A collection that revels in its quirks, smart and sensitive in equal measure.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780812998993
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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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