A heinously humorous exploration of addiction and self-worth.
In Levy’s darkly comic novel, a depraved man at the end of his rope stumbles upon a secret society that allows him to travel through alternate dimensions.
In the East Village in New York City, a man steals a french fry, gets into a fist fight, takes drugs, and has a depraved tryst with a sex worker behind a dumpster—all in the first few pages of this debaucherous satirical comedy. Rusty, a sex-addicted man with erectile dysfunction, spends his days (and nights) pursuing demeaning, degrading sex. After a particularly haunting night spent debasing a woman named Sonya, Rusty decides to respond to an advertisement that promises to cure his erectile dysfunction. When he goes in for treatment, however, Rusty finds that the ad was actually a cover for a secretive and fantastical group called the Wormhole Society, “a secret society that uses wormholes to change people.” Availing one’s self of the wormholes comes with two risks: “losing the self and ending up lost in time.” With nothing to lose, Rusty thrusts himself through a portal (cleverly disguised as a sandwich board inside his favorite local restaurant) and hurtles through time and space. Somewhere in between masturbating in a crowded elevator on 9/11, having animalistic sex with Lucy, the first known human on Earth, and experiencing an orgasm as nothing but a subatomic particle in the Big Bang, Rusty begins to question who he is and how he can be a better man. (He also wonders if “doctors [he] saw in the parallel universe [would] be considered out-of-network.”) Via blunt, sharp prose and rough dialogue (“‘I wanted a ladyboy, but if you’re into extreme humiliation you can stay,’ I slurred as I cracked a popper and felt a wave of warmth surging through my body”), Levy creates characters both deplorable and engaging. Throughout Rusty’s obscene and otherworldly journey, the author boldly tackles topics including human nature, self-worth, and relationships at their ugliest. Not for the faint of heart, this dark comedy is “terminally unique”—and wholly compelling.
A heinously humorous exploration of addiction and self-worth.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798992368802
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Cogito
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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