Kevin Thomas - Using his captivating illustrations and no more than a handful of words, week by week Thomas decrypts some of the most intriguing books of our day for readers of The Rumpus: now eighty-five of his favorites are collected in one volume

Kevin Thomas, HORN! The Collected Reviews. OR Books, 2014.

therumpus.net/author/kevin-thomas/

Most reviewers take thousands of words to do what Kevin Thomas does in nine exquisitely detailed black-and-white panels. Using his captivating illustrations and no more than a handful of words, week by week Thomas decrypts some of the most intriguing books of our day for readers of The Rumpus: now eighty-five of his favorites are collected in one volume.
Fiction and non-fiction, cutting-edge and popular books; the one quality these works have in common is that they’ve attracted Thomas’ remarkably perceptive gaze and pen. This is a paean to reading by a thoroughly unjaded, committed amateur of the art, seriously appreciative of each book’s unique attributes. The works he selects are ones he admires: and he excels at conveying the excitement and respect they inspire in him. What a list he’s compiled: Jonathan Lethem, Jim Shepard, Rachel Kushner, Renata Adler, Georges Perec, David Graeber, Julian Assange, George Saunders, Hilton Als, Oliver Sacks, Cheryl Strayed, Dennis Cooper and Jennifer Egan are just a few of the authors whose work is here brilliantly distilled.
Visual haikus closer to meditative poetry than traditional criticism, Thomas’ unforgettable, evocative drawings often manage to encapsulate the essence of a book far better than a 2,000 word essay in our leading journals. Take a look for yourself.



"What critic – or reader – wouldn’t benefit from a crash course in Kevin Thomas’ reviews? They’re hugely smart, wryly compressed, and visually witty. They beautifully evoke both the book being celebrated and the idiosyncratic mind that engaged it." —Jim Shepard

"How often does an author love a review so much she buys it, frames it, and hangs it on the wall? Kevin Thomas captured the essence of my book, its very heart, and he does it over and over again for books of all different kinds. I feel honored to have received the HORN! treatment, and giddy at the thought of an entire collection." —Emma Straub