A heady, intelligent, and heartfelt collection that rewards readers willing to venture off the beaten path.
Long offers a genre-blurring collection of short stories, poems, chants, and songs touching on myth, satire, elegy, and absurdity.
Drawing upon a well-traveled life and a deep well of literary knowledge, the author delivers a collection that veers wildly in tone—from poetic incantations to tragic tales to playful satire—yet manages to maintain a coherent philosophical throughline: the search for connection, meaning, and catharsis in a chaotic world. The collection opens with poems like “Live Where There’s Water,” a cryptic and wry meditation on artistic purpose and poetic lineage. The standout story “Death Mask” revives the spirit of 19th-century opera with gothic grandeur and heartfelt melodrama. Told through the voice of fictional tenor Otto de Carr, the story explores grief, guilt, and memory in lavish, impassioned prose: “If I fail in this attempt, if you, dear audience, will not accept me after hearing this tale, then I shall be forced to obey the outraged cry of my own vengeful heart.” Long’s recreation of an overwrought yet sincere operatic voice is both impressive and emotionally resonant. “Strange Fox Hunts” offers comic relief, taking a turn toward the absurd as it recounts an over-the-top family legend involving a foxhunt that barrels through a church during Sunday service (the farcical ending is rendered with gleeful exaggeration and satirical bite). In “Getting to Know the Neighbors,” the author turns his gaze to modern suburbia and small-town paranoia as the protagonist observes his eclectic and increasingly bizarre community. His tongue-in-cheek inventory includes “Manic, dangerous book editors,” “Religious fanatics,” and “Nitwits in gigantic pickup trucks jacked up gigantically off the ground.” Throughout, the poems act as thematic anchors or meditative interludes. Some, like “Invocation,” channel ritualistic lyricism (“Invisible spirits, / We fly through the trees”), while others, like “The Poetry War,” lean into autobiographical tenderness. The book’s eclecticism is both its strength and its risk; some readers may find the tonal shifts jarring or uneven. But Long’s prose is consistently well crafted, and his command of voice, particularly in stories with distinct narrators, is remarkable.
A heady, intelligent, and heartfelt collection that rewards readers willing to venture off the beaten path.Pub Date: April 15, 2026
ISBN: 9798988817635
Page Count: 131
Publisher: North House Creative Arts
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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