A brisk, authoritative look at a literary icon.
A celebration of the Victorian novelist’s cunning genius.
Based on insightful close readings of Charles Dickens’ novels, letters, and meticulously revised manuscripts, literary scholar Mullan offers ample evidence of the “technical boldness” and “experimental verve” of Dickens’ prolific oeuvre. In discrete chapters, the author highlights more than a dozen characteristics that set Dickens apart from other writers, including the use of “fantastic analogy” to evoke “people’s strangeness and self-contradiction”; the invention of comically apt names, some of which have entered the popular lexicon; the deployment of coincidences “to move the fancy, asking us to imagine what makes the improbable somehow plausible”; and the shift between past and present tense, which, Mullan asserts, anticipated modernist and postmodernist writers: “None of Dickens’ narrative tricks is stranger or more audacious than this.” Mullan highlights the literary techniques that shape the well-populated novels’ quirky characters. Dickens, who once toyed with the idea of becoming an actor and admired performers who could use different voices, was able “to make a way of speaking comically distinct without being merely laughable.” He closely attended to word choice, using clichés to his advantage, coining words and, Mullan reveals, snatching up colloquialisms, which he pitched into “orotund sentences.” In addition, he paid attention to palpable details—odors, for example—writing “as if his nose were a sensitive instrument.” For Dickens, smell became “a narrative device” that helped readers recall characters during the many months of a novel’s serialization. Besides technical devices, Dickens had particular thematic interests: in ghost stories, for one—at the time “an undeveloped genre” that Dickens promoted—and in drowning, which became more than a useful plot mechanism but emblematic of a widely shared visceral fear. Although Mullan assumes a reader’s familiarity with Dickens’ many works, his ebullient analysis may well generate new fans.
A brisk, authoritative look at a literary icon.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4088-6681-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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