A valuable take on a canonical writer, highlighting how good work stands the test of time.
An enjoyable exploration of how Hemingway’s influence on American literature continues to be significant.
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway gave a direct instruction to writers: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Find the essential truth of the story, and the rest will eventually follow—profound, yes, but surprisingly difficult to do. Cirino and Von Cannon, academics who share a special interest in Hemingway, have been pursuing this idea for years, especially via their One True Podcast. This collection brings together the best of the interviews and adds some other material. Each interviewee was asked to pick their favorite Hemingway sentence (although some pick a paragraph or several sentences) and explain what it means to them. Some examine a sparse, compact line. Others opt for one of Hemingway’s long, swirling sentences. This underlines the variety of Hemingway’s writing as well as his capacity to imply volumes in a few words. Several contributors discuss why Hemingway’s writing has endured, pointing to his focus on the evergreen themes of love, loss, and war. Others note the time and consideration that Hemingway put into his craft, with endless redrafting and rethinking, as well as his embrace of a wide range of the human experience. As he demonstrated, writing is not, in fact, particularly difficult; doing it well and making it look easy, however, is. This is one of the keys to Hemingway: polishing the text until the effort seems to disappear and the authenticity shines through. This is summed up by a line that several writers point to as their inspiration—the concluding line from The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Yes, it is. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick co-wrote the foreword, and contributors include Valerie Hemingway, Elizabeth Strout, Sherman Alexie, Paula McLain, Craig Johnson, Joshua Ferris, Russell Banks, and Pam Houston.
A valuable take on a canonical writer, highlighting how good work stands the test of time.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-56792-713-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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