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
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
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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