Flinty and sharp-edged, these stories show no sign that the octogenarian McGuane is softening up.
Nine stories of dead-end lives and wide-open spaces, set mainly in the American West.
This slim collection from the Montana master seems like kind of a coda to his prolific career. It provides plenty of bleak comedy, as morally compromised characters face mortality and determine that their lives haven’t amounted to much of anything, their existence seems as barren as the landscape surrounding it. In the opening “Wide Spot,” a cynical politician offers a first-person narrative in which a reunion leads to an inappropriate seduction attempt. In “Balloons,” a physician with a dying patient offers another first-person narrative about the surprising retribution he faces for an affair that ended long before. From there, the perspective in these stories generally shifts to third person, but there’s nothing approaching omniscience. The protagonists, usually male, on the downside of middle age, are typically careless and often clueless. The natural splendor of their American West has been undermined by grifters: “Life in the West was a beautiful idea, best left in that state, a conviction not easily conveyed.…The place was infested with land speculators: house flippers, ranch flippers, and river flippers.” Two of the stories feature protagonists who have achieved some financial success, a good distance from Montana, and both are as miserable as the drifters and losers in the rest. In “Thataway,” a chain-store furniture magnate living in Palm Springs returns home for the funeral of one of his all-but-estranged sisters. The disastrous visit makes him realize that he has no home, and on the return trip to California “he had a fleeting hope that the plane would stay up in the air.” The concluding title story is the longest and perhaps the darkest, as a river trip fraught with tension and peril reveals the dysfunction of a tycoon’s family.
Flinty and sharp-edged, these stories show no sign that the octogenarian McGuane is softening up.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9780385350235
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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