A charming and personable (if not entirely useful) writing guide.
A master thriller author explains how he does it.
Having written 38 novels—“I think”—beginning at age 21 while working for his family’s travel agency as a tour guide in Spain (though that one remains in the drawer), Coben sets out to describe his process and to debunk the many instructions and shibboleths laid down by “other writers.” Should you always start with character? Nay! You can start with plot, or at least the beginnings of a plot, but you can also start with setting, as the author did with The Boy From the Woods (2020). “It’s messy,” as he repeats many times, and also fiction is memoir and memoir is fiction; if we never do find out where to start, it’s fun and interesting to read about “the Coben Method,” a system of simultaneously writing and rewriting that produces a first draft that is actually the 10th. Amusingly, despite the scorn for the wisdom dispensed by others, the most functional piece of advice in the book comes to us via Anne Lamott, whose Bird by Bird (1994) is proclaimed the author’s favorite on the topic. (It’s good old “shitty first drafts,” here translated as a call to “accept and even embrace our suckage.”) Coben flavors his admittedly contradictory exhortations with a heaping helping of autobiography, affectionately describing his parents, his brilliant brothers (he was considered the “nice” one, “and we all know what that’s a euphemism for”), and his suburban childhood in Livingston, New Jersey. These took an exciting detour when his grandfather was investigated as a member of the Jewish mafia, and the extended family took a sudden, unplanned road trip to Canada. We do certainly learn how Coben does it, employing a writing practice so dedicated that he carries a backpack full of writing materials with him at all times and will sit down to write literally anywhere. A table in the deli section of the grocery store functioned as his study for several months, and he is “writing this paragraph right now in a boat while my four kids snorkel in a nearby cove.” No one would argue the point that, whatever it is, it works for him.
A charming and personable (if not entirely useful) writing guide.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781538784624
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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