A collection of short but memorable narratives that rupture the illusion of personhood.
Shaw considers alternate modes of existence in this debut collection of literary short stories.
A woman—who may be controlled by a zombie ant fungus—invites her ex-boyfriend over for a late-night reconciliation (“Zombie Ant Fungus”). A parks and wildlife employee is forced to take a bear into her home when there’s no more room in the woods only to realize, a few weeks into the stay, that the “bear” is actually just a man in a bear suit (“Parks and Wildlife”). A zombie, reanimated for the purpose of serving as a crash test dummy, falls in love with his zombie co-pilot, Jane, over the course of several catastrophic drives together (“Crash Test Zombies”). From Dungeons and Dragons clerics to reluctant pit fighters to body-snatching aliens pretending to be human, the characters in these 16 stories press up against the walls of their realities, probing for those places where recognizable humanity turns into something less familiar. In “Bed Just Right,”a family’s suburban home is rendered an exotic museum when their creepy neighbor sneaks in and begins examining their things: “He wonders if Stan’s and Tamar’s toothbrushes are still damp from their morning brushings. He goes downstairs, runs his thumb over bristles. One is moist. The other is dry. The dry toothbrush’s bristles are squashed, flattened, stiff with old paste. Interesting, he says. Very interesting.” In the title story, an inventor devises a way for him and his wife to be the best possible versions of themselves only to realize it will be different versions of themselves who will actually get to enjoy it. Such what-ifs, inversions, and revisions populate the author’s stories, each presenting the world anew in all its vivid, lovely, awful glory.
Shaw’s tales range from dark surrealism to offbeat comedy. The prose is uniformly tight and clever, as in “Gilman,” which opens with the Creature from the Black Lagoon receiving an invitation to visit a retired ichthyologist: “The Gill-man contemplates his lair—a dank, murky cave. He owns little: a boulder, a puddle of fish offal, some chewed-up crocodile bones. He has always wanted to visit Florida.” “Hallmark Christmas Movies (2013-2020)” is composed of a series of unhinged descriptions of potential movies poking fun at the channel’s established holiday format: “Jake refers to her, the woman with no time for love, as ‘Little Miss Mediocre.’ Not to her face, of course. Except that one time. One time too many.” The author has a gift for concision—the stories are on the shorter side, some only a page or two in length. The more playful, premise-driven pieces tend to be the strongest, though some of the more serious stories, like “Wicked Source of Light,” are quite powerful. Readers will be reminded of the work of George Saunders, though Shaw’s stories have a weirder, less reassuring tone. He veers from familiar to alien or alien to familiar in a way that keeps his audience from ever growing too comfortable, fostering a propulsive sense of unease that carries the reader on to the next strange episode.
A collection of short but memorable narratives that rupture the illusion of personhood.Pub Date: July 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781604893472
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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