A spirited collection offering intimate insights into the writing life.
Writers reflect candidly on the literature that shaped them and their work.
Librarian and literary critic Pearl teamed up with media journalist, producer, and playwright Schwager to interview American writers about the books that “whispered most persistently in their ears.” They asked a diverse selection of novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers, “how does the practice of reading inform the life of a writer?” Gently probing interviews elicited thoughtful responses about books that informed each writer’s literary sensibility and professional aspirations. Appended to each interview is a brief list of the writer’s treasured titles. Not surprisingly, many attest to having been early and enthusiastic readers. Jonathan Lethem described himself as a “prodigious, insatiable reader” when he was young. Jennifer Egan, too, was a precocious reader, and she was drawn to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca when she was 11 and discovered Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in high school. Wharton, she says, became a “huge touchstone for me,” as did writers she hoped to emulate, including Ethan Canin, Michael Chabon, and Don DeLillo. For Lethem, Kafka’s The Trial “became this talismanic thing.” Louise Erdrich remembers the impact made by Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. “You started me, Herman, you started me,” she recalls. For several writers, the books they read as children felt alien to the world in which they lived. Susan Choi, the biracial daughter of Jewish and Korean parents, thought of books “as a portal to some better place, where all the pretty people live in nice landscapes.” Growing up in Morocco, attending French schools, novelist Laila Lalami found books “exclusively populated by French people with French concerns.” As a Vietnamese refugee, Viet Thanh Nguyen found Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are “literally too dark for me.” Other interviewees include Luis Alberto Urrea, T.C. Boyle, Siri Hustvedt, and Donna Tartt.
A spirited collection offering intimate insights into the writing life.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296850-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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