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: yesterday
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
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
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