It is deeply reassuring that our dumbed-down world still has room for work like this.
Five essays explore the idea of disappearing and other obsessions of a restless, powerful mind.
The titular first essay is a perfect way into this almost dauntingly intelligent book, employing a few of the author’s signature gambits to winning effect. There are 13 numbered sections: How To Disappear, Ways To Disappear, What They Will Say, People Who Disappeared, Why You Are Not Famous, and so forth. Each of these is an exhaustive list of possibilities for that item, funny, provocative, relatable, vulnerable, cynical, and sobering by turns. This essay is one of the two most straightforward in the book, the other being the third, The Uber Diaries, a series of vignettes describing the author’s experiences as a rideshare driver after a big Hollywood project he had been involved in fell apart and left him disastrously overextended. All the terrible things one might imagine could happen to a driver at the hands of his riders do indeed happen, but lead to an epiphanic ending where the line between driver and rider dissolves. The next essay is much more conceptual or theoretical, titled On the Desire To Reject Narcissism: Notes Toward a Follow-Up Essay to “The Uber Diaries.” Possible openings for such an essay, numbered from 1 to 131 follow, though some are printed with strikethroughs and others only vaguely described, and some sections simply reprint poems by other people, among them Franz Wright, Fred Chappell, and Molly Peacock. Heady stuff. Subsequent essays contain autobiographical material from a painful childhood and a spiky writing career, plus detailed recountings of certain stories Minor is obsessed with, most importantly the fate of eight sailors in a 1968 sailing race. His favorite competitor: “Bernard Moitessier, the sailor who quit the race because he simply wanted to sail the seas.” It is poignantly evident that that’s exactly what Minor means to do with this book: quit the race, sail the seas. You don’t have to be as smart as he is to enjoy the ride.
It is deeply reassuring that our dumbed-down world still has room for work like this.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781956046571
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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