Letters cohere into a multifaceted portrait of a man and his times.
The journeys of a Black literary modernist.
Claude McKay (1889-1948) is remembered for his poetry, journalism, memoirs, and fiction. His output also includes a prolific crop of letters. His correspondents were prominent intellectuals, artists, and activists such as Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, H.L. Mencken, Nancy Cunard, and Max Eastman, among many others. From widely dispersed archival sources, literary scholars Hefner and Holcomb have gathered McKay’s letters from 1916 to 1934, years he spent traveling in the Soviet Union, Europe, and North Africa. In a brief biographical summary sent to literary agent William A. Bradley, McKay wrote that he was born in Jamaica, came to the U.S. in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute, and left after six months, when he enrolled at Kansas State College. In 1914, he made his way to New York, where he ran a cabaret and, when that failed, took on odd jobs. Money troubles recur in his letters—sometimes he doesn’t eat for days—as does alienation. McKay, the editors assert, felt like an “outsider to national and cultural ideologies,” a severe critic of capitalism and “Imperial abomination.” Black, queer, politically radical, he “spent most of his life searching for what ‘home’ meant to him.” The letters reveal an intense, uncompromising man: “Life fascinates me in its passions,” he wrote to writer and socialist Eastman, a close friend. They reveal romantic and sexual liaisons, friendships made and broken, and his take on national character—he finds Russians warm-hearted and Arabs “curious and eager like keen knife blades.” Most definitely, his literary work consumes him. Judiciously annotated, introduced by a detailed biographical essay, and appended with a glossary of names, the collection will be an indispensable source for readers and researchers.
Letters cohere into a multifaceted portrait of a man and his times.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780300276473
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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