An ambitious but meandering effort.
An exploration of Kafka through the lens of early translators like Borges, Celan, and Levi.
In this debut, Hruska investigates the impact of 10 translators, all while aiming to recontextualize the “much-misused” titular adjective. She understands that Kafka’s ineffable essence is rooted in his liminality: He was a German-speaking Jew living in Prague in the early-20th century, and a broad sense of displacement permeates his oeuvre. But Hruska repeatedly attempts to present Kafka’s translators in a way that has their efforts echo the themes of their subject. “What Kafka’s translators have in common with his characters,” she broadly suggests, “is that they were all, one day, torn from the place that had nurtured their relationship with their language and with the world.” These arbitrary connections come at the expense of more in-depth investigations. Snappy lines attempt to overlay these translators directly onto Kafka’s fiction: She claims they worked like “K, the land surveyor, advancing towards the Castle, wide-eyed with surprise, wondering by which staircase, through which window or door, they might gain entry.” “Language is at once judge and jury; it’s a rigged trial,” she writes elsewhere to fold in another Kafka classic. A discussion of Kafka and Borges is weakened by a cursory search for parallels: Hruska claims “literature was their only source of tranquility. Their only habitable space; the only space in which they could find their way.” A chapter on French translator Alexandre Vialatte is more developed and one of the book’s highlights: Hruska illuminates an underappreciated facet of Kafka, noting that while writers like Camus “disguised him as some professor of despair,” Vialatte “saw the funny side of the Kafkaesque.” Alternatively, a chapter on Bruno Schulz spirals into a discussion of Schulz’s visual art and Nazism in Ukraine until Hruska awkwardly redirects: “So what does all this have to do with Kafka?” she asks. Readers will often find themselves asking the same thing.
An ambitious but meandering effort.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780063486249
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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