A consciously caustic critique of white fragility that means to leave a mark.
Fair warning: Never underestimate the self-importance of delusional white people. Or, just white people.
After tackling authoritarian-doomed near-futures in two pyrotechnical novels, Doten turns his lens on the real perpetrators of postmodern collapse. These 14 dynamic stories take a jaundiced look at the most comfortable, most privileged demographic in all of history—from their perspective, to acid effect. The book opens with a grotesque monologue by Elon Musk in “Even Elon on Human Meat,” while later in the book, his so-called boss tosses around the idea of using nuclear weapons against Covid-19 in “Open for Business.” Doten takes a different approach to the idea of both sides in “Pray for Q,” in which a queer artist meets his conspiracy-minded mother for a tense meal, only to flip over to her deranged mindset for the story’s fatal back half. Meanwhile in “Dying but It’s Something Else,” a son on the verge of a nervous collapse and his casually racist father talk about everything, anything but the truth. There are young voices, too, if strange and misguided ones, from the basement-dwelling white nationalist in “Banana Bunch Challenge,” to the unstable podcaster in “I’m Wide Awake It’s Jumpman” who leans into a modern patois of gamespeak, on-mic persona, and cultural schizophrenia. Every whitey is welcome here, from the Greek chorus of “J6ers” to self-delusional expats in “Fifty Thousand Gringos” to the self-described “Worst Karen Ever” in the title track. These venomous, discomforting stories may soon feel “of their time,” but what a time. Imagine the white malaise of Sam Lipsyte and the heightened satire of Gary Shteyngart shot through with a tab of Mark Leyner’s hyperstylized metafiction. Maybe that’s the right frame of mind to ask what white people are really made of, these days.
A consciously caustic critique of white fragility that means to leave a mark.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781644452905
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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