A Southern comic master in top form.
From the well-known Southern humorist, another fun house gallery of small-town misfits at the ends of their tethers.
As the nation’s, and the region’s, politics get ever more divided and mean, Singleton’s satire grows darker and sharper. Yet what makes it work, as always, is an essential sweetness and decency. These are people struggling, surrounded on every side by cruel or goofy absurdity, but they make sense where they can. It’s an upriver swim. The title story, for instance, features a house flipper named Celia, a mobile flea market, and a hook-handed man who’s founded a shuffleboard league for veterans missing limbs (they use weighted Skoal tobacco tins as pucks); the “Wounded Boarders” help Celia handle a stalker and restore her sense of community. In “Horace Poor, Horace Mint,” an ambitious high school student gets a summer job running a magnetic sweeper around roofing sites to pick up stray nails; then—at his numismatist father’s urging—starts running the sweeper in nearby woods during breaks to look for buried coins; he ends up mired for good in his hometown. It’s an origin story of stuckness. We meet a disgraced yearbook photographer who’s hunting revenge; a couple who lure “would-be burglars” to their homestead and then shoot them in the kneecaps; and many more. Singleton’s tales are discursive, spontaneous-feeling; they might go anywhere, end anywhere. A few short pieces feel like preliminary sketches, but the collection’s longest may be the finest individual story of Singleton’s career. It takes the form of a rambling epistle, hilarious and poignant, from a father to the 20-something daughter who’s just discovered he exists and that her "parents" are really her maternal grandparents, her mother, Lydia, having died in childbirth. The title is the final sentence Lydia spoke to her beloved, after being whisked away from college and from his life. Lydia calls from her hospital room when her ultraprotective mother nips out for a Fresca, and the couple make post-birth plans for a future that will never come to pass. Just as our narrator tells Lydia he loves her, the mother returns, and Lydia responds, “I know about childproofing.”
A Southern comic master in top form.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9781938603945
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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