Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic.
An ethereal collection of memories, delicately rendered before their inevitable crumbling away.
In 31 short vignettes, Erpenbeck (Kairos, 2023, etc.) grasps at hazy recollections that cumulatively form a body of work akin to an abstract mosaic. Each two-page section focuses on a particular fixation: One recalls construction at her son’s preschool, another celebrates prewar coal stoves, and another considers Berlin’s sanitation workers and the heirlooms they encounter while disposing of the city’s trash. An underlying sense of helplessness pervades as Erpenbeck attempts to concretize these recollections into something lasting. But “there’s so much to inherit these days,” she laments, “so many memories, it’s just too much to bear.” While some stories feel like futile attempts at archiving a personal history, others seek to accept the unavoidable losses of forgetting. “The farewells are what I remember,” she writes of the death of a loved one. On the disappearance of a friend’s ex-husband, “It remains astonishing that thin air can sometimes have just as much weight as something that is really there.” Writing about New Year’s Eve, she thinks of time moving “backward and forward” and wants to “believe in the ethereal web, the floating landscape of time, whose paths run between birthdays, weddings, deaths, and other anniversaries, instead of between houses.” One curious story mourns the bastardization of the traditional Splitterbrötchen pastry. Erpenbeck dreams up an argument with a baker (“No! The whole roll looked different, it wasn’t layered!”) before reaching an ominous meditation. “For the first time,” she writes, “it strikes me that the word disappear has something active at its core, that there is a perpetrator in the word who makes things I know and cherish disappear: Dismantle, discard, disband, disparage, discredit, disembowel, disuse.” Erpenbeck leaves it to her readers to assemble these enigmatic fragments into a meaningful whole. Those who indulge her idiosyncratic prose will be rewarded, finding in this slim book a wistful record of memory and loss.
Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780811238113
Page Count: 96
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
