Featuring 386 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXVIII, NO. 4 | 15 FEBRUARY 2020 REVIEWS Jenn Shapland reclaims a queer icon in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers p. 62 Also in the issue: Colum McCann, Saeed Jones, Naomi Shihab Nye from the editor’s desk: Beyond Biography Chairman BY TOM BEER HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher MARC WINKELMAN John Paraskevas Biography is perhaps the trickiest of the literary arts. In addition to # Chief Executive Officer possessing dogged reporting and research skills, the biographer must MEG LABORDE KUEHN also be a shrewd psychologist, getting inside the mind of the subject and
[email protected] Editor-in-Chief understanding their motivations. This involves a lot of evidence-gathering TOM BEER along with, inevitably, some highly educated guesswork.
[email protected] Vice President of Marketing “Biography is not merely a mode of historical enquiry. It is an act of SARAH KALINA
[email protected] imaginative faith,” writes Richard Holmes in This Long Pursuit: Reflections Managing/Nonfiction Editor (Pantheon, 2017), a collection of essays on his cho- ERIC LIEBETRAU of a Romantic Biographer
[email protected] sen craft. Holmes, who has written biographies of Romantic poets Percy Fiction Editor Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others, likens biogra- LAURIE MUCHNICK
[email protected] phy to “a handshake across time,” emphasizing the deeply personal nature Tom Beer Children’s Editor of the work. VICKY SMITH
[email protected] Jenn Shapland, the author of (Tin House, Feb. 4), My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Young Adult Editor knows just how intimate biographical work can get.