Darkly entertaining yarns about people trying to bridge the gap between shabby reality and improbable dreams.
Grand visions intrude into banal lives in this sometimes-hangdog, sometimes-luminous debut story collection.
Zasada’s tales foreground mostly underachieving protagonists whose disappointments are heightened by an uneasy feeling of unfulfilled purpose. A New York deli manager eating a sandwich in Central Park has an enigmatic vision of a mountain, a river, and raging horses; a rock star who finds his life increasingly frenetic but hollow puts off his suicide plan only to accidentally overdose and fall into a coma filled with dreams of heaven and hell; a young couple whose lives are a blithe, nonmaterialistic idyll break up when the man starts to feel stirrings of ambition; a closeted gay political operative in Portland rescues a vagrant injured in a bike crash who turns out to be the golden boy he had a crush on in high school; a dismissed Pakistani government functionary who thinks of California as a paradise of honesty and nubile women gets a chance at a lucrative new berth in the bureaucracy, but only if he cooperates with sleazy bribery schemes; a middle-class man comes into a fortune but struggles to translate it into a happy or meaningful life; a professor communes with the shade of a long-dead Jewish philosopher who teaches her that death is more productive than life; an 18th-century Native American in California who has seen his world collapse with the arrival of Spanish conquerors goes in search of the mythic source of the world’s water; an American greenhorn in Australia sets out on a yacht voyage into fearsome Pacific waters and takes on a crew of chatty ghosts; and a Jewish man saved from certain death by his mother’s magical incantation spends his life wondering if his survival was mere luck or a sign of a higher destiny.
Zasada’s stories form a connected cycle, with characters and motifs popping up in several narratives in a common fictive world centered on a few resonant themes. The stories are capacious and sweeping, often taking characters from childhood to old age to fit their seemingly haphazard experiences into a larger arc. Zasada combines pitch-perfect renditions of small, dejected lives (“That night, alone, Mickey drank tequila from a shot glass and sat by a window, looking out at the sleepless street below his apartment. He felt all wrong—just all wrong”) with evocations of the cosmic sublime that they feel is looming just beyond their reach (“He lay on his back for a full hour looking up through a small opening in a stand of tall straight pines as the sky became star-filled and infinite…he was conscious of the mountain beneath his body pressing toward a secret and jagged hole leading into a greater universe”). Spanning these two registers are his characters’ clumsy but penetrating stabs at philosophizing: “As for the Incantation, it’s all just coincidence. Some old mumbo jumbo and selective observation….I don’t like the boys hearing any of that crap. Like religion, it confuses them. And it makes them think there’s like, some way out of things, when there’s not. There’s no way out of things.” By turns funny, touching, and bleakly ruminative, Zasada’s yarns captivate as their characters struggle to reconcile their vast yearnings with the meager victories that the world begrudges them.
Darkly entertaining yarns about people trying to bridge the gap between shabby reality and improbable dreams.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-88585-8
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Upper Story Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
