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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.
'The fiction is brief and mostly forgettable. But an essay called "In Defiance of Gravity" starts as a riff on an obscure club and winds up being an ode to the combination of unconventionality and humor that define Robbins's career as a writer.' - PW.
This information about Wild Ducks Flying Backwards was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tom Robbins has been called "a vital natural resource" by The
Portland Oregonian, "one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists
in the world" by the Financial Times of London, and "the most
dangerous writer in the world today" by Fernanda Pivano of Italy's Corriere
della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle
since 1962.
Novels
Another Roadside Attraction (1971)
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Jitterbug Perfume (1984)
Skinny Legs and All (1990)
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)
Villa Incognito (2003)
Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005, collection)
B is for Beer (2009)
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