Ah, yes, we remember these guys. With pleasure.
A compendium of commentary published by the brothers McCourt in periodicals large and small.
Frank McCourt, the award-winning author of the memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996), died in 2009 at 72; his brother, Malachy, an actor and writer himself, in 2024 at 92. Frank was also a committed high school teacher, and the current collection was compiled by Tom Allon, a colleague he befriended at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School who later became both his and Malachy’s editor at a neighborhood newspaper called The West Side Spirit. Allon and his son, Jonah, selected articles, starting with Frank’s encomium to McSorley’s Old Ale House, published a decade before Angela’s Ashes in The West Side Spirit; they arranged them in sections dedicated to the writing life, to McCourt family stories (many familiar, and repeated more than once here), as well as to Irish identity, Christianity and religion, teaching, and more. The latest piece in the collection is also by Frank; it’s a moving discussion of spirituality and prayer from Life magazine, from 2004. There are many highlights along the way for devotees of these zesty Hibernian wordsmiths. In a piece discussing sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, including his own, Malachy writes, “I forgive you, you rotten rat’s abortion, you diarrhea of a hyena, you snake snot, you sperm of a cockroach.” In a discussion of the potato penned for The Irish Voice, Frank writes, “England’s major contributions to the world, then, are Christianity, civilization, and cholesterol. (You may quibble about the first two but my advice is to go and have some mashed potatoes and you won’t give a tinker’s damn in the heel of the hunt entailed as you’ll be in the toils of Eros.)” In “Deadhead Daughter,” a surprising and poignant piece written for Rolling Stone in 1998, Frank reviews his experiences as a father: “How was I to know my biggest rival would be Jerry Garcia?” In a reaction to 9/11, Malachy—who ran for governor of New York State in 2006—advises, “Drop the word ‘hate’ from your vocabulary.”
Ah, yes, we remember these guys. With pleasure.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781419790980
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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