The best kind of shaggy dog story, delightful in every particular.
Good news, fiction fans—there's autofiction, fabulism, literary biography, and even Yiddish theater in the afterlife.
“The afterlife, it seemed,” reports the narrator of this book, who is called ________ or sometimes ________ ________ but definitely resembles Hemley himself, “was not unlike the annual Associated Writing Programs Conference, full of smart, unfulfilled people such as me.” Elsewhere described as “footnotes having a get-together,” this is the Café of Minor Authors, aka Oblivion, where poor________ has landed after a massive heart attack at 62. Minutes after receiving word from his agent that the auction for his new book was “in the stratosphere,” he got a second notification: “_______, I’M SO SO SORRY. That was meant for another client.” Oof. So much for that mortal coil. But who does ________ find is his guide in the beyond but a “jovial boor” named Jozef whom he knew in his 20s in Chicago when both worked at a literary magazine. Jozef shows him how to order a cappuccino, where the library is, and how the dead can haunt history, returning to scenes in the lives of their heroes. Off they go to Prague to visit ________’s beloved Kafka, who, it turns out, was briefly acquainted with his great-grandmother Hanna, an actress in the Yiddish theater. Hemley has lots of fun with the details of these ghostly visits: “I was too shy to sit in Kafka’s lap, as it were (a sentence I never imagined myself writing before this), so I sat on the chair beside him where Brod had placed his hat.” A mostly hilarious mashup of real incidents and characters from Hemley’s career, historical fact, and giddy fantasy, the novel also has moments of real sorrow and poignancy. For example, _________ can’t encounter figures of the early 20th century without recalling which were to perish at which concentration camp—all three of Kafka’s sisters, for example. And in the end, it’s about how to live—and die—with frustrated ambitions and still have a pretty good time.
The best kind of shaggy dog story, delightful in every particular.Pub Date: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63752-781-8
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Gold Wake Press
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
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