After fashion, career, psychosis, and recovery, a personal essayist finds “grace in the ordinary.”
A young, queer, Chinese American writer “well versed in the theoretical discourse” takes on fashion, social media, and urban nightlife.
Mak has published nonfiction in a wide range of media, from Artforum and Art in America to the Guardian and the Nation, and he’s a co-founder of a writing and performance series called Writing on Raving. Most of these pieces began as internet essays intended for friends, derived from extended Facebook posts that dealt in gossip, fashion, and sex. The author worked in the New York advertising world and then “came of age” in Berlin’s club scene before drug addiction and a psychotic breakdown brought him back to his parents’ home to recuperate. Mak recounts his experience in the fashion world as often being the “smartest person in any room” but also the “most invisible,” and he offers trenchant observations about the emasculation of the Asian American male and identity-based rejection. His insider status gives him insight into how new-media models emerged from fashion blogs and the street, and how social media and the iPhone brought about the “collapse of fashion time.” The author also writes powerfully about being sexually assaulted, describing how the traumatic experience led him to surrender to nightclub life “to distract myself” in a milieu where he felt safest in underground rooms. In Berlin, Mak introduces readers to “a lost generation who had entered an evaporated job market after the 2008 financial crisis.” Throughout the book, this “skinny Chinese kid from the suburbs” offers a wealth of observations on topics ranging from transgressive literature (Jean Genet, Siouxsie Sioux) to the power of the erotic (“All fear is erotic, motivated by compulsion over reason, and perhaps the greatest fear, in the evangelical mind, is the fear of the erotic”).
After fashion, career, psychosis, and recovery, a personal essayist finds “grace in the ordinary.”Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781635577945
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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