A potent collection that speaks to dark times.
Capturing the moment.
In her foreword to this 40th volume, series editor Kim Dana Kupperman ominously describes how the collection “preserves the history unfurling in the liminal zone between democracy and tyranny.” Editor Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker, echoes Kupperman in her introduction. When screening essays, she was “looking for vigor rendered from the depths of exhaustion.” Palestinian Sarah Aziza’s painful opening essay, “The Work of the Witness,” confronts visions of death, suffering, and destruction in Gaza. Christina Sharpe’s “The Shapes of Grief” explores the 2022 Buffalo, New York, grocery store mass shooting and the bombings in Gaza, while “meaning is in crisis.” Growing up impoverished in Mandaluyong, Manila, is the subject of Hannah Keziah Agustin’s “Homeland Fictions.” Eula Biss paints a devastating portrait of another homeland in “Love and Murder in South Africa.” “The Pain of Traveling While Palestinian,” by Mosab Abu Toha, is about more than pain; there’s frustration, fear, anger, hopelessness. Khalil AbuSharekh’s light “Zeppole (aka Awama),” about his wanting new shoes as a boy, is a breath of fresh air. The gem in this collection is Summer Hammond’s “A Little Slice of the Moon,” a brilliantly written, complex piece about a young girl and her dysfunctional rural Iowa family. “Nesting,” by Jarek Steele, is a humorous essay about her pregnancy and living in a rat-infested garage-house. Other offerings include psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir’s “On Boredom,” Christian Lorenzen’s “Literature Without Literature,” and Matthew Denton-Edmundson’s “How To Love Animals,” on the dangers of raising goats.
A potent collection that speaks to dark times.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063351592
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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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