There’s something for everyone in this sumptuous collection.
The esteemed anthologist and Columbia professor compiles another vast array of American essays.
“What makes this period so interesting,” writes Lopate, “is the mélange of clashing generations and points of view” as well as the rise of the personal essay. This period opened the door to a range of diverse, powerful voices, many of which have been underrepresented in many anthologies of the 20th century. Lopate begins with a piece by Hilton Als, who creates a lovely autobiographical portrait of actor Louise Brooks, written from her point of view: “I was asked to perform with the Ziegfeld Follies; I was the most hated Follies girl, ever (too well-read, too much attitude); I was loved then and only then by several lesbians of intellectual distinction and many fairy boys who drank and wrote.” Next is Nicholson Baker’s reflective series of vignettes, “One Summer,” in which every paragraph begins with those two words. Anne Carson’s somber “Decreation” delves into the lives of three women who “had the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring” while Terry Castle’s lighthearted, confessional “Home Alone” explores her vice for alluring interior decorating magazines. Sloane Crosley’s witty “The Doctor Is a Woman,” describes the process of freezing her 67 remaining eggs, “a gaudy amount of eggs for a human to produce….I am not a woman—I am a fish.” In “Matricide,” Meghan Daum writes affectingly about her mother’s passing, and death appears again in poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch’s comforting “Bodies in Motion and at Rest.” Sleight-of-hand modernism scatters about in Ander Monson’s “Failure: A Meditation, Another Iteration (With Interruptions).” Lopate makes an appearance in “Experience Necessary,” responding to an essay by Montaigne. As in previous volumes, the list of contributors is enviable: Patricia Hempl, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris, Alexander Chee, Eula Biss, Margo Jefferson, Yiyun Li, Darryl Pinckney, Rebecca Solnit, etc….
There’s something for everyone in this sumptuous collection.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-56732-5
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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