A playful journey toward the space between languages.
A polyglot’s travelogue, steeped in the joys and peculiarities of exploring a foreign language.
This book, named after a term used to describe “the phenomenon of existing outside of one’s mother tongue,” gathers a series of short observations about languages, borders, and semantics collected over the course of the author’s frequent academic travels. Tawada (Suggested in the Stars, 2024, etc.), who writes in both Japanese and German, is a perfect guide for this peculiar journey, as she embodies the exophonic experience and can showcase firsthand how existing outside one’s native language can reveal hidden wordplay and energy that a native speaker might otherwise overlook. Each vignette follows roughly the same format: Tawada travels abroad to a literary event and encounters a linguistic hiccup that unfurls into a tangent of intellectual rumination. In one, she reflects on being asked what language she dreams in, a question she feels unfairly suggests that one language is more “real” than the other. While in Seoul, she considers the idea of “foreign literature” and how that concept transforms under political turmoil, “particularly here in Korea, where Japan had forced the Korean people into an exophonic condition against their will.” Many segments discuss “loan words,” terms adopted into vernacular as near-homonyms of their foreign source, such as the Japanese “koppu” (cup) and “basu” (bus). Tawada frequently drifts into details that only fellow language-savants will fully appreciate: She parses out compound words, marvels at the individual meanings of their segments, and then overlays their German and Japanese translations. These digressions may exhaust those readers looking for a more cogent point to these flights of fancy, but Tawada explains that these curious observations can lead to something profound. “Play,” she explains, “can temporarily free us from the habit of seeing words solely as tools for conveying meaning, allowing us to come in contact with the language itself.”
A playful journey toward the space between languages.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780811237871
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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