Tender, mysterious, and moving.
Longing and loss sometimes lead to understanding in this reflective collection of 11 short pieces.
Taking Elizabeth Bishop’s keening poem “One Art” as her epigraph (and one story’s title), Ozeki shows people struggling with losses past, present, and future. Some tales offer retrospective glimpses of key episodes in a character’s life. “The Anthropologist’s Kid” poignantly contrasts the eponymous narrator’s recollection of the ugly breakup of his childhood friendship with a half-Filipina girl with the happy memory of the day they met and bonded. The narrator of “One Art” looks back at 1978 to remember how she was shaped as a writer and a woman by her brief but intense undergraduate relationship with a female visiting scholar. That narrator directs our attention to “the gaps and elisions where the real story hides,” which are key elements in Ozeki’s strategy to keep readers off balance. Plain prose with enigmatic undercurrents is also part of that strategy; “Dead Beat Poet” and “Where Ambition Goes to Die” lay out surreal scenarios with deadpan matter-of-factness. So is Ozeki’s playful insertion of details from her own life into clearly fictional scenarios; “fiction” is a flexible word here. Some stories immerse readers in a character’s present-day struggles. In “Leafblower,” the impoverished poetry MFA pilfering books from the elderly couple renting her a room finds herself becoming their caretaker as the wife succumbs to dementia. The unnamed author in “The Problem of the Body” schemes with her 17-year-old granddaughter to avoid a book tour while looking back at the premature death of her daughter—the girl’s mother—and the recent loss of her husband, grievously mourned. “Stories,” Ozeki muses in “The Typing Lady: An Author’s Note,” “are collaborations between people who read and people who type. They are how we co-create each other and dream ourselves into being.” This warmth toward the fiction-making process—and her characters—leavens the collection’s generally sad atmosphere.
Tender, mysterious, and moving.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780593832714
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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