Even on rereading, Talese’s work gets better, like fine wine.
Revisiting Gotham.
“New York is a city of things unnoticed,’’ Talese writes at the outset of his latest collection, a spirited compendium of pieces that deal with everything from the preferred habitations of the wild cats of Manhattan to the builders of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the social protocols of George Plimpton’s Paris Review set, and the kidnapping of mobster Joe Bonanno. It’s a bit of misdirection. Talese is nothing if not a noticer, focusing on the grainy details that distinguish journalism that aspires to literary art from dutiful wire service reports. The book shines with the love that the author, the son of an Atlantic City tailor, bears for his adopted home, giving E.B. White’s legendary ode, Here Is New York, a run for its money. Documenting his journalistic doggedness, the entries are preceded with reproductions of Talese’s original typescript, dotted with emendations and reminders of where he wants to take the tale. Much of this deeply reported material is repurposed from earlier pieces, often updated. For example, The Bridge, detailing how the Verrazano-Narrows structure championed by “master builder’’ Robert Moses forced Brooklynites from their Bay Ridge homes, was first published as a stand-alone volume in 1959. Here, it includes a preface for a new edition, released in tandem with the 50th anniversary of its opening. His understated portrait of Bill Bonanno, the ambivalent but dutiful son of the kidnapped mobster, is notable not only for its narrative, but the skill it took to gain access to this famously private circle. The collection includes Talese’s previously published iconic piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,’’ which appeared in his 2023 collection, Bartleby and Me. Despite that caveat, one must pay the nonagenarian auteur his due.
Even on rereading, Talese’s work gets better, like fine wine.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780063392182
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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 impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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