A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.
Famed for such chillers as “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson reveals a warm, witty side in her voluminous correspondence.
There’s still an edge to the hilarious domestic vignettes she sends her parents, clearly the raw material for the now less famous magazine pieces collected in Life Among the Savagesand Raising Demons: Tending to four rambunctious children while cranking out the magazine pieces and novels on which the family income depended was a perennial challenge. Husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, a professor at Bennington for most of his career, never made much money, and his urgings to Jackson to get back to work form a disquieting undercurrent to the generally cheerful letters. The earliest letters are her lovestruck missives to Hyman when both were students at Syracuse University, but an angry letter from 1938 reveals a darker side to their relationship, delineated in more explicit detail 22 years later. Her anguish over his unrepentant womanizing and habit of demeaning her in public while ignoring her in private makes a heartbreaking counterpoint to delightful portraits of family activities that also ring true but tell only part of the story. The dark side so evident in Jackson’s fiction is kept for her work, but we see its origins in a 1938 letter to Hyman declaring, “you know my rather passive misanthropic tendencies, and how i [sic] hate this whole human race as a collection of monsters.” Jackson’s avoidance of capital letters adds to her correspondence’s charmingly idiosyncratic flavor, though she adheres to more conventional punctuation in letters to her agents Bernice Baumgarten and Carol Brandt, which offer candid snapshots of a working writer’s life. Later letters chronicle without self-pity the years of declining physical and emotional health that preceded her untimely death at age 48 in 1965.
A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13464-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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