Best suited to academics and those with a serious interest in Austrian literature.
The first English-language publication of two collections of essays by the noted German writer.
Published in German in 1985 and 1991, these scholarly essays were written while Sebald was pursuing a university career, before the publication of such unique blends of fact and fiction as Austerlitz and Vertigo. The pieces show their academic roots: Ranging from relatively well-known writers (Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Kafka) to those likely to be unfamiliar to English speakers (Adalbert Stifter and Charles Sealsfield), they are dense critical exegeses peppered with phrases such as “In this paper I will try to determine the nature of [Thomas] Bernhard’s political, moral, and artistic credo,” or “Names such as [Josef] Weinheber and [Karl Heinrich] Waggerl will suffice to demonstrate the idea of Heimat which persisted well into the 1960s.” Heimat, generally translated as homeland but also connoting a sense of belonging, is an important concept in these essays, or rather—unsurprisingly for Sebald, who spent most of his life as an expatriate—the loss of homeland and/or a feeling of being estranged from it. This notion comes across most powerfully in “A Kaddish for Austria,” on Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish writer who saw the Holocaust coming; and in “Westwards—Eastwards,” about the ambivalent feelings of Jews who left their shtetls for the cities of the Hapsburg Empire. Other themes Sebald discerns as running through Austrian literature from the late 18th century through the 20th include the destruction of nature, the inadequacy of science, psychiatry, and rationalism to completely understand human behavior, and, as translator Catling deftly puts it in the introduction, “the crises of consciousness and identity, particularly bourgeois identity.” In addition to the previously mentioned essays, one on Schnitzler and two on Kafka are of general interest, but most are likely too specialized for the average reader.
Best suited to academics and those with a serious interest in Austrian literature.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781400067725
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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