A powerful work of historical scholarship that brings to life one of American fiction’s most complex creations.
Reviving Huck’s friend.
Few know more about Mark Twain than Stanford Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and few have done more to excavate the racial world of Twain’s America than she has. The author of the landmark book Was Huck Black? Fishkin here writes a biography and critical history of Huckleberry Finn’s companion, the enslaved Jim. Boldly affirming the need to keep the N-word in print but refusing to bow to later convention and use that word as an epithet for Twain’s fictional man, Fishkin gives a life to the kind of person who would have been familiar to the author and many of his readers. Her book writes a history of race relations in America, focusing on various myths about people of African descent. The work explores the place of Black men and women in Twain’s own life and looks at how the novel’s critics often used Jim as a marker for their own predilections. Jim is someone we have often made our own: We project our fears, our sentiments, our fantasies on him. Here, Fishkin restores life to the character. She argues that Twain wished to create a figure of creative power—of imagination, bravery, and eloquence—and dramatize the net that slavery cast over him. Jim comes back, here, as a figure of great wit. Fishkin has a fine ear for comedy in Twain, and a great insight into dialect. In scene after scene, Fishkin shows how Jim is “more active, smart, and assertive…than he is often given credit for.” Jim’s adventures have lived on: stage adaptations, films, classroom discussions, popular cultural artifacts, and so forth. Any reader of Percival Everett’s award-winning novel James should read Fishkin’s book as a scholarly mirror through which to better perceive this great character and ourselves.
A powerful work of historical scholarship that brings to life one of American fiction’s most complex creations.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780300268324
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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