Even if you’re a Swift aficionado, you’ll learn a lot from this enchanting book.
A piercing look at an undeniable phenomenon through a literary lens.
English literature professor McCausland learned the hard way that haters are going to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate when, in 2023, journalists caught wind of her plans to teach a Taylor Swift–themed seminar at Ghent University in Belgium. Her class was met with ridicule on the internet, and she received messages calling her “a moron, an idiot, a ‘big bitch,’ and a stupid woman.” Her book, she writes, is “the result of a massive free association exercise that has been going on in my head since 2006” and seeks “to make historical English (by which I mean Anglophone) literature as relevant, accessible, and interesting to as wide an audience as possible” using Swift’s lyrics as inspiration. Each chapter dives into a different literary genre or conceit, tying Swift’s songs to classic works of literature. In one, she discusses the dismissal of Swift’s success by would-be cultural guardians, comparing their disdain to the 19th-century scorning of novels popular among women: “The implication is that women and girls just cannot be trusted with culture. We take it too far. We become obsessive and emotional.” Other chapters deal with Swift as a poet, making use of conceits like anacoluthon (“when a speaker abruptly changes course”) and apostrophe (“a spontaneous exclamation directed at an absent person or an object”); the concept of the antihero (which is the title of one of Swift’s most beloved songs); and themes of grief and madness. McCausland discusses an impressive array of past writers: Aphra Behn, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to name a few. This relentlessly smart book serves as the perfect introduction to literary theory for Swift’s fans, as well as a fascinating exploration of the pop-music phenomenon to outside observers—you don’t need to be a Swiftie to enjoy it (though it can’t hurt).
Even if you’re a Swift aficionado, you’ll learn a lot from this enchanting book.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781639369898
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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