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 he is rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Robbins’s briefer writings often exhibit the same five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language.
Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are a couple of short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an off-beat assessment of our divided nation. And wherever we open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, we’re apt to encounter examples of the intently serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”
“Buy the ticket, take the ride,” was a favorite slogan of Hunter S. Thompson, and it pretty much defined both his work and his life. Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the roller-coaster of a career at the magazine that was his...
Combining personal reflection and social observation, Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction is an incendiary polemic about this young century's failings, e-driven and otherwise, and at once an example, definition, and defense of what "freedom...
Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defend...
The author whose boundless imagination and storytelling powers have redefined the horror genre, from 1974’s Carrie to his epic Under the Dome, reflects on the very nature of terror—what scares us and why—in films (both cheesy and c...
Passionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The CorrectionsJonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became k...
A collection of all-new Paris-themed essays written by some of the biggest names in women’s fiction, including Paula McLain, Therese Anne Fowler, Maggie Shipstead, and Lauren Willig, edited by Eleanor Brown, the New York Times bestselling auth...
From the bestselling author of Stitches, and Help, Thanks, Wow comes her long-awaited collection of new and selected essays on hope, joy, and grace.Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wis...
Final words and heartfelt remembrances from bestselling author Pat Conroy take center stage in this winning nonfiction collection, supplemented by touching pieces from Conroy’s many friends. This new volume of Pat Conroy’s nonfiction bri...
“Chabon has always been a magical prose stylist, adept at combining the sort of social and emotional detail found in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus stories with the metaphor-rich descriptions of John Updike and John Irving’s inve...
AudiobooksNow review by Michael on 2010-01-06 14:23:18
Okay, if you're not one who likes hearing why / when an artist creates, like the fact that Graham Nash wrote Our House for Joni Mitchell, or that Joni wrote Circle Game for Neil Young after he wrote Sugar Mountain, then you won't appreciate this CD.
But if you'd love to learn that Robbins finds Diane Keaton sexy, draws inspiration from Terrance McKenna & Bagwan Rajneesh, and dreams of Naomi Watts driving the getaway Ferrari for his jailbreak, the engine revving like a velvet chainsaw, then you've got to put this at the top of your queue.
The most captivating aspect of this CD is Robbins himself narrating. Like sitting across from him in a Seattle coffehouse, sharing a mocha latte with the smoke grey rain dripping outside, listening to him share stories of his life past. Wonder-full stuff!!
