Offbeat yarns from a sui generis author.
A clutch of stories set in the author’s native Chile—and surrealist parts unknown.
Originally published in 1937, this collection by Emar (1893-1964) arrived at the height of the Modernist movement; his eeriness and fluid, satirical approach to storytelling put him in league with better-known European and North American contemporaries. Indeed, his work seemed to anticipate the elliptical style that would make Borges world famous. These 10 stories are placed in a sensible sequence—“Four Animals,” “Three Women,” “Two Places,” and “One Vice”—but any concept of order is deceptive, as each story finds an unusual approach that sometimes only barely adheres to its supposed subject. “The Green Bird” concerns a taxidermic parrot the narrator received while living in Paris, but what starts as a cool remembrance of youth soon takes an absurd and violent turn. “Papusa” concerns a tsar holding court with a ghost, a jester, and the woman of the title—a scene the narrator observes through an opal on a ring. “The Hotel Mac Quice” centers on a man and his wife out for a stroll on vacation before becoming separated because of the man’s sudden urge to find his toothbrush. “The Unicorn” opens with a notice in the paper by a man who is looking for the safe return of “my best ideas and my purest intentions,” launching a satirical trek to the Egyptian pyramids and Ethiopia, home to the mythical creature. Clearly, plot summary only goes so far; the best stories here thrive purely in Emar’s language, which can be richly synesthetic; “Damned Cat,” the most potent story here, starts with a nature walk that features stones that store heat, a weed that “smells of interplanetary distances,” and a cat observed with a peculiar geometric rigor. Veteran translator McDowell doesn’t attempt to make these stories adhere to logic, but they all possess a certain clarity—concerned with violence and loss, thoroughly sensual, but questioning what our senses tell us.
Offbeat yarns from a sui generis author.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780811232074
Page Count: 176
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
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