These philosophical, melancholic, darkly funny tales merit a place beside those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino.
In these 18 short stories, written between 1920 and 1940, Russian writer Krzhizhanovsky turns a sardonic eye on history, God, philosophy, the early days of the Soviet Union, and the writer's fate.
After the title character dies in "Comrade Punt," his pants continue to perform his office job so well they are given a promotion. In "The Gray Fedora," a nihilistic thought jumps from a man's head into his new hat. When the fedora is mistakenly worn by the wife's lover, it causes his suicide, then floats downriver and continues to infect anyone who puts it on with a feeling of utter pointlessness. In these stories, thoughts and ideas have lives of their own. Literally. ("Only half-inhabited, like a hamlet after the plague, the old man's brain was thinly populated with thought-invalids and thought-pensioners.") In "The Life and Opinions of a Thought," the struggle of putting an idea into words is told from the point of view of a line by Immanuel Kant. In "Paper Loses Patience," the letters of the alphabet stage a rebellion, abandoning their posts in books, in newspapers, on signs. In "God is Dead," Nietzsche's statement is taken literally; the Almighty dies, long after people have stopped believing in Him, in the year 2204, with surprising consequences. Erudite, playful, wry, these stories are concerned with human failure and the failure of language itself: "We all understand each other by syllables...we don't know how to read someone else's feelings, the essence hidden in the word." They are also darkly funny. A parrot that sings “La Marseillaise,” subjected to the vicissitudes of war, is described as having "the look of an atheist selling indulgences." In the title story, a narrator who eschews the title of writer sends letters to strangers. "What, you may ask, makes me drink? A sober attitude toward reality." He addresses an unknown fellow insomniac whose window stays lighted throughout the night: "This new socialist property must be carefully and exhaustively studied. I'm doing this as best I can." Krzhizhanovsky died in 1950, his work all but unpublished in his lifetime. We are lucky to have the fruit of his exhaustive study available now; as his letter writer says, "We all live on history's Unwitting Street."
These philosophical, melancholic, darkly funny tales merit a place beside those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-488-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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