Filled with expertly crafted stories, essays, and poems, this volume is a triumph.
The definitive issue of a venerated literary journal.
For the last decade, Freeman, an author as well as an executive editor at Knopf, has curated a uniquely well-realized literary journal to which he has lent his name, with issues loosely devoted to themes like family, home, power, and animals. The 10th and final issue is fittingly devoted to conclusions, and features writing from an all-star cast, including Sandra Cisneros, Dave Eggers, Omar El Akkad, Louise Erdrich, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Denis Johnson, Mieko Kawakami, Rebecca Makkai, Colum McCann, Tommy Orange, and many others, with a fine mix of emerging and established writers. At first glance, that “conclusions” theme seems like a less-than-clever dodge: Every story has a conclusion, and any that doesn’t can be said to resist the constraints of traditional narrative—so any story fits the theme. In the end, though—pardon the pun—the quality of the writing included is such that there’s no need to quibble over Freeman’s criteria one way or the other. In one of three poems by renowned Song Dynasty writer Li Qingzhao, gorgeously translated by Wendy Chen, Li describes “Late spring. Why still / such bitter homesickness? / Ill, I comb my hair, / my regret long as each strand.” In a short essay, Aleksandar Hemon describes how, at the end of a visit, his father would sit down and demand, “Conclusions!” This was a habit that at first annoyed Hemon, but then, “as per the usual process, it became an amusing story I would tell, which then naturally led to my doing the same thing, except ironically”—and then not so ironically. In “The Endlings,” Tania James describes a pair of Neanderthal sisters, “the product of a bizarre and illegal in-vitro experiment,” who escape from their enclosure, and the young mother, on vacation with her husband’s family, who becomes interested in their story. Every piece in this collection stands on its own and is as expertly faceted as a gem.
Filled with expertly crafted stories, essays, and poems, this volume is a triumph.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780802161475
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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