A companionable and encouraging presentation of tried-and-true advice.
Musings on the craft and discipline of writing from the venerable Chilean American author.
There aren’t too many surprises in this guide for storytellers, but one of them is a shout-out to Ken Follett, one of whose doorstopper historical novels was the cause of the only time in her life that Allende missed a plane. She attributes Follett’s spellbinding magic to the power of his first few sentences and turns to her own work to see if she passes the test. Her 2017 novel In the Midst of Winter is found wanting, while her early masterpiece, In the House of the Spirits (1982), is quoted at approving length. She didn’t write these sentences first, she notes; they turned up later in the process and were moved. Unlike Follett, who works with detailed outlines, Allende is often hundreds of pages in before she knows what her book is about. She is unpretentious and often self-deprecating, offering in one endearing passage that “My beloved son treats me with the kind of condescension we usually bestow on other people’s pets.” Each chapter is followed by a summary of its tips. Some are familiar—test dialogue by reading it aloud—but the reader might not have thought of listening to audiobooks to analyze how other authors convey mood and tone. Allende writes in Spanish and comments interestingly on the vagaries of translation. One of her translators told her that the dialogue she’d written for a love scene had to be toned down, as “no decent man would say that rubbish.” Actually, comments Allende, “in Spanish they do.” Furthermore, humor doesn’t always translate; what’s funny in Chile is often “simply rude” in Venezuela. She also deals with the response of family members to the representations of themselves they see in fiction. Some of her relatives didn’t speak to her for years after In the House of the Spirits was published. But when the movie adaptation came out in 1993, a portrait of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons replaced the picture of her grandparents on the mantelpiece.
A companionable and encouraging presentation of tried-and-true advice.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9798217094639
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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