A sensitive meditation on women’s quests.
When women speak out.
In a trenchant feminist critique, Nelson (The Argonauts, 2015) expounds on fame, ambition, and the patriarchal silencing of women by focusing on two cultural icons: poet Sylvia Plath and singer/songwriter Taylor Swift. Because both “traffic in making the personal public,” they have suffered harsh consequences: “voyeurism and sadism, idolatry and demonization.” Although Plath’s greatest fame occurred after her suicide, in 1963, praise from some quarters has been undercut by disparagement from others; like Swift, she has been accused of self-absorption and self-indulgence, with “calls for the artist to look outside herself for subject matter” and “charges of her vulnerability being faux.” As Swift has become increasingly popular, she has inspired “round after round of resentment, animosity, and threat.” But unlike Emily Dickinson, who looked askance at the possibility of being in the public eye, Plath and Swift coveted the power—and the remuneration—that comes with recognition. Plath, Nelson notes, repeatedly sent her work to mass market magazines; “I will slave and slave until I break into those slicks,” she vowed. She was deeply disappointed when her novel The Bell Jar received only a few lackluster reviews when it was published in January 1963. Already overwhelmed by depression, four weeks later, she killed herself. Swift, whose lyrics “make nods to Plath” and also to Dickinson, understands the relationship between death, fame, and femininity and, more crucially, the relationship between fame and power. Plath felt an enormous drive “toward freedom, toward power, and a rage against the conditions that inhibited it, including those within herself.” Swift has harnessed her own power, wielding it to create herself as an “economic force, and element of nature.” Nelson admires Swift’s audacity, just as she regrets the forces that defeated Plath.
A sensitive meditation on women’s quests.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781644454084
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
