A playful journey toward the space between languages.
A polyglot’s travelogue, steeped in the joys and peculiarities of exploring a foreign language.
This book, named after a term used to describe “the phenomenon of existing outside of one’s mother tongue,” gathers a series of short observations about languages, borders, and semantics collected over the course of the author’s frequent academic travels. Tawada (Suggested in the Stars, 2024, etc.), who writes in both Japanese and German, is a perfect guide for this peculiar journey, as she embodies the exophonic experience and can showcase firsthand how existing outside one’s native language can reveal hidden wordplay and energy that a native speaker might otherwise overlook. Each vignette follows roughly the same format: Tawada travels abroad to a literary event and encounters a linguistic hiccup that unfurls into a tangent of intellectual rumination. In one, she reflects on being asked what language she dreams in, a question she feels unfairly suggests that one language is more “real” than the other. While in Seoul, she considers the idea of “foreign literature” and how that concept transforms under political turmoil, “particularly here in Korea, where Japan had forced the Korean people into an exophonic condition against their will.” Many segments discuss “loan words,” terms adopted into vernacular as near-homonyms of their foreign source, such as the Japanese “koppu” (cup) and “basu” (bus). Tawada frequently drifts into details that only fellow language-savants will fully appreciate: She parses out compound words, marvels at the individual meanings of their segments, and then overlays their German and Japanese translations. These digressions may exhaust those readers looking for a more cogent point to these flights of fancy, but Tawada explains that these curious observations can lead to something profound. “Play,” she explains, “can temporarily free us from the habit of seeing words solely as tools for conveying meaning, allowing us to come in contact with the language itself.”
A playful journey toward the space between languages.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780811237871
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
