An offbeat take on the campus novel, full of sex, intrigue, and marginalia.
The late Argentine writer and Princeton professor continues his Emilio Renzi cycle of novels.
Renzi, an investigator-turned-novelist, returns as a visiting professor of literature at a leafy college in New Jersey while researching the Argentina-born British novelist W.H. Hudson. There he meets Ida Brown, a combative academic superstar who imagines herself outside the system while actually being the system: “Her salary was a state secret,” writes Piglia, “but it was said that they raised it every six months and that her sole condition was that she must earn one hundred dollars more than the highest-paid male (that’s not what she called them) in her profession.” Ida is working on Joseph Conrad, a friend of Hudson’s, and warns Renzi to stay away from her intellectual territory. Naturally, they fall into bed together, hiding their tryst by publicly pretending that nothing is going on. Everything comes full circle: Renzi is “interested in writers who were tied to some double identity, bound up in two languages and two traditions,” just as he himself is—and as Ida is, and the Russian widow across the hall, and other players in the novel. Things take an unanticipated bad turn when Ida dies, the victim of a letter bomb, which brings out the investigator in Renzi. He himself comes under suspicion, grilled by detectives, one of whom tells him grimly, “Nothing is irrelevant under these circumstances.” Whodunit? Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent figures in a sidelong way while the perp is a failed scholar of Dostoyevsky-an cast whom Renzi visits in prison: “When he moved, his footsteps clinked with a gloomy sound; he was detained, and for the first time the word took on its full meaning for me.” It’s all very bookish. The resolution of the story is nicely indefinite, though Piglia’s appropriation of the Unabomber and his manifesto seems a touch obvious, as are the faint echoes of Stieg Larsson.
An offbeat take on the campus novel, full of sex, intrigue, and marginalia.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63206-220-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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