For all its ups and downs, well worth having for both its treasures from the past and the demonstration of how much vitality...
Truth in labeling alert: Though all 15 stories veteran anthologist Penzler has collected are by African-American writers, most wouldn’t count as noir.
Practically all the contents are reprints, some from long ago, but apart from Walter Mosley’s “Black Dog” few are likely to be familiar. Generally speaking, the vintage rediscoveries are the best. Although the stories by Pauline E. Hopkins and George S. Schuyler could have been left to rest in peace, Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Sheriff’s Children” is unexpectedly touching in its portrait of past sins coming home to roost. Rudolph Fisher’s “John Archer’s Nose” spins deft complications out of a family-circle killing. Chester Himes’s “Strictly Business” captures a lost world of black pulp. Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Summer Session” turns white slavery into an easygoing anecdote. Ann Petry’s “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” is a mood piece of disturbing power. The contributions by relative newcomers tend to be more professional but less distinctive. Paula L. Woods, Robert Greer and Eleanor Taylor Bland present routine whodunits. The most interesting thing about Gary Phillips’s caper gone bad and Gar Anthony Haywood’s tale of jealousy and revenge between lifelong friends-turned-enemies is that they really are noir. The standout among the new kids on the block is Edward P. Jones’s “Old Boys, Old Girls,” which crams a lifetime’s worth of jailhouse disillusionment into 30 pages.
For all its ups and downs, well worth having for both its treasures from the past and the demonstration of how much vitality this neglected vein of crime fiction reveals.Pub Date: May 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-039-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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