Smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven’t flagged.
Recent essays by the acclaimed novelist on art, feminism, censorship, inspirations, and her own work.
Atwood’s third collection of essays, reviews, speeches, and book introductions covers work from 2004 to 2021, during which time she cemented her place as a literary legend. Her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, became an established classic, a hit TV series, and, as the Trump years neared and then arrived, troublingly prescient. In multiple essays, Atwood discusses that novel’s inspiration, creation, and influence—and how she came to write its 2019 sequel, The Testaments. In the context of that book and others (particularly her climate novels), this collection is marked both by her ongoing concern with the ethical and moral issues her fiction raises and an appealing flexibility in terms of subject matter. She treats keynote-speech invitations as opportunities to research subjects she otherwise might not. At a conference for nurses, she explored the distinctions between compassion and empathy, and at a gathering of neurologists, the role of the brain in fiction. Still, there are certain themes to which the author consistently returns. Literary inspirations are key, from fellow Canadians like Alice Munro to feminist polestars like Simone de Beauvoir and Ursula K. Le Guin to canonized authors like Shakespeare, whom she discusses with particular attention and verve in multiple pieces. (Most of them touch on her 2016 novel, Hag-Seed, a reimagining of The Tempest.) The cyclical nature of crises is another theme. In the context of The Handmaid’s Tale and Covid-19, Atwood writes eloquently about how misogynist and epidemiological crises have habitually repeated themselves throughout history. Resistance to censorship informs many of these pieces, though the author also pushes back against the kind of groupthink that demands writers always be political spokespersons. Throughout, her tone is sprightly and informed; only an essay from the perspective of an extraterrestrial from planet Mashupzyx feels half-baked.
Smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven’t flagged.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54748-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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