A whimsical, visually arresting assemblage of thoughts on love and life.
Wright offers a collection of thoughts and verses ostensibly from a mythological figure.
The governing conceit of this slim book is that its contents represent dispatches from Erato, the Greek Muse who inspires lyric poetry (and specifically erotic poetry). “I am Erato, daughter of Mnemosyne and Zeus,” she proclaims to kick things off—what follows is a week’s worth of messages from the Muse’s inbox. These messages, per Wright, voice the “challenges, grief, and responsibility that accompany love.” The text is illustrated by Rosenthal and Wright (with assists from AI) with images that range from visual echoes of ancient Greece to more whimsical collages of photos, cartoons, and artwork from other eras. Erato’s thoughts shift from the sublime to the ridiculous—and often shade into the bawdy or suggestive—as she opens up her “sinbox, [her] inbox, a brimming dreamway that slips liquid script into the future’s abyss.” The full-color illustrations adorn every page, sometimes spilling into borders, at other times serving as faded backdrops to the words, and Wright includes a list of the AI prompts that generated the raw material for each picture (“Dragon reading Bible photo”; “Fiddle covered with fur in an old hotel room”). Fittingly, music is often invoked, with the work referencing artists from David Bowie to Jackson Browne to Dvořák; it also includes snatches of lyrics and quick descriptions of tunes. The written sentiments throughout the book range from the sultry to the silly, often in the same line (“Playing a lyre to lure my would-be lover. A song I learned from a grasshopper fire”). While ancient writers like Propertius and Ovid are mentioned, this is a thoroughly modern-feeling volume, in terms of both outlook and wordplay. Some modern-day slang runs the risk of sounding dated (at one point, Erato refers to herself as “just someone’s boo”), and the jocularity can sometimes feel strained. Still, the startling visuals and the author’s spirit of play are entertaining.
A whimsical, visually arresting assemblage of thoughts on love and life.Pub Date: June 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780998900469
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Xanadu
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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