The literary value of these works extends far beyond the insight they offer into Shange’s life and artistic career.
Previously unseen writing from an essential Black author.
Shange is perhaps best known for her Obie Award–winning play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. But in addition to being a playwright, she was also a poet, a novelist, and a diarist, and when she died in 2018, she left behind a wealth of unpublished work. Harvard professor Imani Perry searched through these archives and chose the essays, poems, short stories, and plays presented in this collection. Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement and bestselling author, offers a foreword in which she explains how “Shange’s words gave me language for my own experiences with trauma and love.” Born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1948, the writer would ultimately change her name and become a prominent figure in the Black Arts Movement. In some of these pieces, Shange offers glimpses of her family—well-educated, financially well off, and keenly aware of racial difference. She describes a voracious love of reading that encompassed everything from Nancy Drew to Giovanni’s Room as well as the process of discovering the voice that begins to emerge in her early poems. Those acquainted with the author will see familiar themes emerge as she engages with colonialism, code switching, white supremacy, liberation politics, sexism, sexual violence, and collective trauma. She writes of desire and despair and revolution and Black joy using language and imagery that she was taught to hide from white people. In a series of short vignettes Perry gathers into a chapter called “Dark Rooms,” Shange speaks candidly of her struggles with mental health and her years in psychoanalysis, and she insists that therapy made her a better writer. Several plays, only one of which has been performed, are presented here. Shange continued writing and experimenting right up until her death, and the last section of this book contains poems and prose she produced between 1996 and 2018.
The literary value of these works extends far beyond the insight they offer into Shange’s life and artistic career.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780306828515
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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