An ugly, terrifying memoir of childhood, war, and violation, rendered into nightmarish English.
The horror, the horror.
Pierre Guyotat (1940-2000) was an experimentalist French writer whose autobiographical essays, novels, and plays were so graphically explicit that some of his work was banned by the French government. His service in the Algerian War in 1960 shaped his politics and personality: anti-authoritarian, pushing the French language to its limits of meaning, and fascinated by the filth of fighting, illness, and recovery. This memoir of his experiences from the late 1950s to the early 1960s won the 2018 Prix Médicis, an award for authors “whose fame does not yet match their talent.” The book’s descriptive grotesqueness will tax even the most open-minded of readers. Excrement is everywhere. Body fluids ooze. Dreamscapes of a rural French childhood stand alongside nightmares of war. The long, central essay of the book, “Exodus,” begins with soldiers lounging, the writer coming out of imprisonment, and the very landscape taking on a threatening, bodily form. Who knows what is happening here? “Pieces of Barbary fig limbs in long heaps ahead of us, their rotting fruit covered in flies, thorns untouched: Should we walk over them to continue on?” Someone or something is always being violated. “The light reddens, the shadows hasten over the groves, the rocks…a bosom pokes forth, half out of its camisole, a shoulder bare beneath the strap, a cheek, a profile; eyelashes blink, a mouth half opens, nostrils flare, a scent of fresh shampoo, a hand descends between a pair of thighs, against light shorts: dangerous days, everything that can be cut, gouged, slashed, tugged out from inside the body, beaten, cut to pieces, ripped, burnt, must be defended.” Without an introduction from the translator, and with no notes to guide us through this writing, the book remains a weathered, almost illegible signpost on the desert pathways of the avant-garde.
An ugly, terrifying memoir of childhood, war, and violation, rendered into nightmarish English.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781681379197
Page Count: 208
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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