Lyrical meditations on the creative imagination and the animal in all of us.
Cages of the imagination.
What makes us human? Should we look inside ourselves, study social groups, and meditate on the past? Zambreno has a different answer. In this eloquent collection of essays, the novelist and essayist argues that we find ourselves in the mirror of animals. Stories about visiting zoos intertwine with reflections on primatology and photographs of creatures. A Victorian snapshot of children riding an elephant prompts this rumination: “Perhaps [it situates] the Eurocentric nineteenth-century zoo attitude, a narrative of colonialism and alienation from labor (absent while present), a story of tragedy and absurdity, the only possible tonal registers for the history of capitalism.” Zambreno offers up what they call a bestiary—evoking those older medieval collections of moral tales of animal behavior. Each essay becomes a kind of social allegory. In a section on the work of Franz Kafka, the author sees his famous Metamorphosis as a story of humanity lost in the face of modern, bureaucratic life. Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. That moment is the lens through which we are invited to see Kafka in the large—a man living always with the animal inside him. A photograph of Kafka and a girlfriend and a dog becomes an emblem of a search for contact, for companionship that humans cannot offer the creative writer. Zambreno writes in the wake of W.G. Sebald, whose autofictions about photographs and found things live in the penumbra of postmodern alienation, and of Hugh Raffles, whose Book of Unconformities gives us an encyclopedia of uncanny objects. Zambreno’s is less a book about animals or other humans than it is a tour of the zoo cages of the writer’s own mind, opened for all of us to gaze on and gasp.
Lyrical meditations on the creative imagination and the animal in all of us.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798893380200
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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