A thorough, occasionally unwieldy look inside the mind of a modernist titan; essential reading for Kafka scholars.
A fresh, unadulterated translation of Kafka’s notebooks, dense with introspection and writerly despair.
Until now, the diaries of the iconic Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) were only available in English via an edition edited by his literary executor, Max Brod, who famously denied Kafka’s deathbed request that his writings be destroyed. Though Brod salvaged Kafka’s writing, he also took a heavy hand to the diaries, suppressing homoerotic passages and overly streamlining Kafka’s prose in places. Benjamin’s new translation is based on an unexpurgated German critical edition published in 1990, and it provides a clearer glimpse into Kafka’s process. Starting in 1910, Kafka began writing observations about readings, plays, cabaret performances, and, occasionally, brothels in Prague, chronicling trips around Europe and drafting essays and stories, often reworking and expanding them repeatedly. He also discusses his publications, frustrations with his job and family, and various romantic courtships. But the attraction of Kafka’s diaries has always been his coruscating descriptions of his existential struggles as a writer and human being. He captures his frustration in ways that are wrenching, vivid, and highly quotable: “Some new insights into the creature of unhappiness that I am have consolingly dawned on me”; “the pleasure again in imagining a knife twisted in my heart”; “the story came out of me like a veritable birth covered with filth and slime.” In light of his labor to gain attention during his lifetime—true fame would only arrive after his death—such passages are especially piercing. Still, the new edition isn’t always user-friendly for casual readers, studded with hundreds of footnotes and asking readers to bounce back to an earlier notebook to read the conclusion of a story draft begun in a later one.
A thorough, occasionally unwieldy look inside the mind of a modernist titan; essential reading for Kafka scholars.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4355-0
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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