Kirkus Reviews Cover Stories

The first line of Nicotine—Gregor Hens’ meditative exploration on his life as a cigarette smoker—is a stark admission. Over 20 years, Hens proclaims that he smoked more than 100,000 cigarettes. “I’ve even enjoyed a few of them,” he writes. Startling as that number may be, Hens realized upon further thinking that the number in the book is actually a little shy of the truth. “If I calculate roughly how much I really smoked it’s more like half ...

When the opportunity to read aloud arises, acclaimed poet Nikki Grimes shines.

“Oh, I love to read, whether it’s to a single person or an audience,” says Grimes, who spoke with Kirkus by phone from her home in Corona, California. “I’ve found that we really don’t grow out of the love of being read to—I have friends who occasionally call to ask me to read them something.”

In the course of the interview, she offers to read aloud ...

In 2010, Nicole Dennis-Benn took a Jamaican vacation. But she wasn’t a typical tourist.

“Growing up there, I had this image of what Jamaica is,” says Dennis-Benn, who was born and raised in Kingston, the nation’s capital and largest city. “When I visited for the first time as a tourist, at the resort, I wasn’t getting the real culture—it was a performance. I knew for sure that these individuals were going home to nothing after giving us the fantasy ...

Nicola Yoon is a self-described “romantic goober.” She loves (and writes) young-adult romances, and she really, really loves her husband, David. The two—she’s a reformed electrical engineer from Jamaica, and he’s a Korean-American English major—met in grad school. Despite their differences, they fell in love, got married, and eventually had a daughter. Yoon’s anxious love for her child gave her the idea for her first novel, Everything, Everything, which tells the story of Maddy, a girl who is allergic ...

Reader, you don’t owe Maria Semple anything.

“You don’t owe it to me to read my book,” Semple says over lunch at Tilikum Place Café in downtown Seattle one sunny September day. “I owe it to you to get you to the end of my book. You don’t owe me not to just go, ‘Oh fuck,’ and throw my book across the room if it’s boring—if it’s like taking your medicine.

“I have students,” she continues, “and ...

Anuk Arudpragasam came of age in southern Sri Lanka while civil war waged in the north. Near the end of the 26-year military campaign, in May 2009, additional tens of thousands of Tamils were killed in conflict-zone camps. Southerners, living their everyday lives, didn’t know.

“The Sri Lankan government didn’t allow independent observers or journalists into the war zone, so nobody really knew,” says Arudpragasam, author of The Story of a Brief Marriage. The news sources were either the ...

Jason Reynolds is well-aware that he doesn’t fit the stereotype of a writer. He has long hair and tattoos and prefers sneakers to tweed.When he visits schools, he says, “there’s always one or two kids who say, ‘I didn’t think you were gonna look like this. I didn’t think a writer could look like you.’ ” What they mean, he points out, is that they they thought he’d be white, or at least lighter skinned.

Reynolds sees it ...

Among the many gems in Stuart Nadler’s dazzling new novel, The Inseparables, is this: “Nobody wore half a dozen amulets quite like my mother. It’s like she’s the female Mr. T.”

Oona, an orthopedic trauma surgeon in Boston, is speaking to her 15-year-old daughter, Lydia, as they marvel at the vintage author photo on a recently reissued book first published in 1976. That book, also called The Inseparables, is an earnest paean to female pleasure (replete with primal anatomical ...