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This is the first book-length study of the popular novelist Tom Robbins. Whimsy and humor characterize Robbins' work, but style and language are the keystones. Hoyser and Stookey show how Robbins deftly uses style and humor to depict the absurdities and injustices of our world. His novels constantly challenge perceptions of the world that people automatically label as normal. His fiction criticizes the complacency of humans in a world becoming increasingly alienated from nature and the joy of life. In addition to a critical analysis of each of his novels, the study contains biographical material never before published and the first full-length bibliography on Robbins, including a bibliograph...
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 On September 21, 1991, FBI agent Robert Marston received a call at his house from an operator with the bureau’s New York switchboard. The caller was involved in an investigation into an illegal landfill. He wanted Marston to speak to someone named Al D’Arco. #2 The agent was eventually able to speak to Al D’Arco, and the two began talking about the landfill case. D’Arco said people had tried to kill him, and he wanted to retaliate. He said he had weapons at his disposal, and was prepared for anything that happened. #3 Marston spoke with D’Arco for several minutes, explaining that he was from upstate New York and that he worked for the FBI. He tried to keep his voice as normal as possible, as though he were talking to a neighbor at the church fair he would soon miss. #4 Marston called his partner, Jim O’Connor, and told him about the plan. You’re kidding, said O’Connor. I thought maybe someone was kidding me. Marston made a few more calls to agents he knew would be eager to interrupt their Saturday nights for a mission like this.
A startlingly original novel from the New York Times bestselling author hailed by Financial Times as “one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world” “[Tom] Robbins’s comic philosophical musings reveal a flamboyant genius.”—People Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads. “Robbins is a fabulous storyteller.”—The Boston Globe
An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations.... It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils. Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat. In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself. Or was it Jezebel?
Known for his meaty seriocomic novels–expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow–Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country- music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. Whether ...
More than twenty interviews with the acclaimed author of Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life With Woodpecker, B Is for Beer, and many other novels
The first ever collection of short fiction and nonfiction essays from one of the world's most beloved and original bestselling authors, WILD DUCKS FLYING BACKWARD is classic Tom Robbins - and a must for fans and newcomers alike. A treasure trove of all new fiction, published here for the first time, and a selection of nonfiction, some in print for the first time and some not in print for decades, it ranges from tributes such as odes to redheads, kissing, Diane Keaton, Leonard Cohen and Ray Kroc - the founder of McDonald's - to musings, travel essays, and art critiques. From short stories to poems and even country song lyrics, this collection will be a rare treat for Tom's throngs of loyal fans of his unique offbeat, metaphorical style - and a perfect introduction for newcomers to his prodigious talent. With almost three million copies of his novels sold, Robbins is one of those rare novelists to approach rock-star status, attracting sellout crowds at his personal appearances in the US and abroad. He is the author of eight juicy, daring and totally original novels.
An “impossibly imaginative” (Vanity Fair) novel of “brilliantly offbeat satire” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) from the New York Times bestselling author of Still Life with Woodpecker “Bursts with energy . . . Those who cherish [Robbins’s] gift for metaphor, simile, and verbal riffs will revel in their plentitude here.”—Entertainment Weekly Imagine there are American MIAs who chose to remain missing after the Vietnam War. Imagine a family in which four generations of strong, alluring women share a mysterious connection to an outlandish figure from Japanese folklore. Imagine them as part of a novel that only Tom Robbins could create—a magically crafted work as timeless as my...
A “deranged and delightful concoction” (Fortune) about a CIA agent with uniquely peculiar proclivities, from the New York Times bestselling author of Still Life with Woodpecker “Clever, creative, and witty, Robbins tosses off impassioned observations like handfuls of flower petals.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there ...
“This is one of those special novels—a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and sane.”—Thomas Pynchon The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all. Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.