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TONE

A fresh perspective on an elusive element of literature.

A focused study of literary tone.

Samatar, author of The White Mosque, and Zambreno, author of The Light Room, offer a lyrical, erudite meditation on the enigmatic concept of tone in literature, drawing on responses from readers in the self-designated Committee to Investigate the Atmosphere. In the eclectic works they examine, tone can take on qualities of fog, dust, rot, snow, and light; color, temperature, or sound. The tone of Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand, for example, seems to their students as “gray.” The authors assert that “tone, as in sound, stands for the oral, the presence of the speaking body. It indicates what is absent from writing.” It stands, as well, for “something like a collective mood.” In a translated novel such as W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, tone becomes “something like a communication of voices.” Samatar and Zambreno consider a wide range of texts, including Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and pieces by Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Borges, and Bolaño; criticism by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and many others. The committee members also provide glimpses of their own lives. They are teachers; one is a nursing mother; one is furnishing a home; one has a young daughter “currently in the stage of liking to draw animals but not feeling confident as to whether she can draw animals in a realistic way.” They are tired of being quarantined and of communicating on Zoom. At a conference, they were buoyed by meeting others interested in tone. When a graduate student remarked that “a professor once told them that Tone was a window,” they were greatly pleased at the aptness of the image. “If tone concerns ecology,” the authors write, “then it is about making a space for relation, and it seems clear now that for us, in the end, our studies in atmosphere have been about making a space where certain things can be said.”

A fresh perspective on an elusive element of literature.

Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023

ISBN: 9780231211215

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Columbia Univ.

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

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A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A CARTOON COLLECTION

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

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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

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LIFEFORM

Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving.

An actor and comedian tells the story of her journey from being an unpaired “animal” to a “new mammal mother” in love.

After Slate completed her first book, “the issue of finding a partner…never rested and never allowed rest for [her] either.” Senses heightened, she had stepped into her most animal self and was on a quest to “fulfill [her] mammal instincts.” Loneliness and emotional vulnerability made her seek connection with neighborhood dogs and insights from books that promised to bring soulmates. When love did finally find her, the anxiety that he would reject her for being herself and “drinking tequila on a Saturday afternoon…then [having] a bath with my friend” was intense. After the pair became a couple and Slate became pregnant with the baby she called “the lifeform,” her neuroses—which the author mocks through an imaginary session with a psychologist—went into overdrive. Yet even as she wrestled with her fears, Slate also discovered that the body that was so often a “bay of doubt” was also becoming a “harbor of well-being” for the life-form to which she was attached. Then, during a time of “plague and disruption,” the author “exploded [her] vagina” to give birth, becoming not only a mother, but a “mammal with a soul that [was] born anew every day.” Though still haunted by a “purple-dark hole marking me in the afternoons,” Slate had become secure enough in the “nest” she had built for herself to see the hole more as a “bluish egg-thing” portending possibility. At times whimsical in its flights of fancy and always surprising in the moments of lyrical grace it offers, Slate’s book celebrates the transformative power of surrendering to love and life.

Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024

ISBN: 9780316263931

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024

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