A gift for Austen’s devoted readers on the 250th anniversary of her birth.
Celebrating a beloved writer.
British biographer, novelist, memoirist, and literary scholar Todd admits that she was late in discovering Jane Austen. “She wasn’t my childhood passion,” she writes, but certainly Austen has become a significant focus of her scholarship: Todd edited the Cambridge edition of Austen’s works and is deeply knowledgeable about her life and times. In an engaging melding of memoir and literary analysis, Todd offers a close reading and personal response to Austen’s most indelible characters, including Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and the Dashwood sisters, Marianne and Elinor, as well as the men, relatives, friends, and neighbors with whom they interacted. As she reflects on Austen, Todd charts her own path as a scholar, first in England and then in the U.S., where she studied and taught at a time when women’s studies and French critical theory were shaping English departments. Both perspectives informed Women’s Friendship in Literature, her book about intimate relationships in women’s fiction and in their authors’ real lives. Austen appeared in that book, as did Mary Wollstonecraft, the subject of another of Todd’s biographies, who also features significantly in this current volume. Besides responding to Austen’s fiction, Todd takes a discerning—and admiring—look at her letters: “mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people—some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment—and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine.” Although Todd finds the letters captivating, the novels have proven most revelatory for her, spreading “out and round me like rich material, a shot silk of rippling ambivalence, of passion and affection, temperamental undercurrents, neediness and intellectual solitude, confusions clarified, resilience, exertion and stillness—and love (however ironised).”
A gift for Austen’s devoted readers on the 250th anniversary of her birth.Pub Date: March 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781009569316
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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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