A trenchant essay collection about race and identity online.
A science-fiction writer meditates on the internet’s human aspects.
In this wide-ranging essay collection, Onyebuchi traces his personal development through video games, literature, and the internet. In “Select Difficulty,” he uses the experience of playing the video game The Last of Us as an opportunity to examine his relationship with his Nigerian father, who died when the author was only 10 years old. In “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” the author contemplates the role of the Black writer in the context of cultural artifacts ranging from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to videos of “police-initiated executions” of Black citizens. In “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” he articulates the emotional damage he suffered while working a job that required him to comb the internet to uncover “what’s going on in the world before most other people do.” Onyebuchi positions these chapters as a window into his multiple selves, all of which, he says, contribute to the way we shape our cultural world, on- and offline. He writes, “All this time, I thought the key to my multiplicity, to exhibiting that multiplicity online, lay in retrieving a previous self. In reality, this manifold self is a thing I am building, a thing we are all building one tweet, one Angelfire webpage, one sentence at a time.” Onyebuchi’s cultural vocabulary is impressive, weaving together references to, among others, Graham Greene, Nas, and Walter Mosley. Although some chapters are more cohesive than others, this is a lively and astute read.
A trenchant essay collection about race and identity online.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780802166258
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Roxane Gay Books/Grove
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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