For those wondering what translators do and how they do it, this collection is a must.
A vivid portrait of the translating life.
Davis is known for both her precise, uber-concise short fiction and her translations of Proust, Flaubert, and others. In this immersive collection, she offers a second (following Essays One) in-depth exploration of foreign languages and the art of translation. As a girl, learning German as a second language created a “hunger” in her to find out what words “mean.” The author begins by describing the 21 pleasures she gets from translating, including how it helps with her own writing; she enjoys subsuming herself in the writer and another culture and the pure joyous comfort that comes from it. She prefers beginning a translation without reading the book. Davis had already translated more than 30 French books before undertaking the daunting process, which she describes in luscious detail, of translating Proust’s Swann’s Way. In an essay on learning Spanish, she offers advice on how children should learn a foreign language, explaining how she learned by reading a Spanish translation of Tom Sawyer. Essays on translating “one kind of English to another”—e.g., converting Sidney Brooks’ memoir, Our Village, into a poem—and why she does these as experiments are fascinating. The experience of translating Michel Leiris’ The Rules of the Game “was heady because, for the first time in my translating life, I felt like a conduit through which the original French was effortlessly passing to become, instantly, an English equivalent, even a close English equivalent, in some way identical to the French, as though I had achieved some version of Borges’s Menardian ideal.” Other languages Davis discusses are Dutch, Gascon, and the “two kinds of Norwegian.” Taking on a new translation of the oft-translated Madame Bovary, Davis, the inveterate translator, writes, “the more the better.” Numerous examples of her and others’ translations are included throughout.
For those wondering what translators do and how they do it, this collection is a must.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-14886-7
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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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