SOURCE: “Friends for Life: A Writer Remembers,” in Washington Post Book World, January 8, 1989, p. 7.

In the following review, Krim offers a favorable evaluation of Kissing Cousins.

Any writer who asks to review a new Hortense Calisher has obviously got big self-destruction problems. This latest Kissing Cousins is only a veritable sliver, a mere 100 or so pages, and yet so masterful/mistressful is Calisher with her fertile, fine-pointed pen that the result can depress a fellow practitioner for weeks. Why you say? Because very few in our trade can compete with the resources, the promiscuous deposits of literary gold, that “Hotense” (as her southern kissing cousin calls her) brings to the page: without even breaking into a fine bead of perspiration, she throws out enough wit, music, candor, grace and frightening smarts to electrify the dull and chasten the self-satisfied.

And one can only boost one’s tattered self-confidence...