Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins
This paperback collection gathers Tom Robbins's shorter writings from publications including Esquire, Harper's, Playboy, and the New York Times. The anthology presents essays, articles, observations, country-music lyrics, brand-new short stories, unpublished poems, and cultural assessments that showcase the author's distinctive voice outside his seriocomic novels.
What's Inside This Collection
The book features journalistic pieces alongside creative writing that demonstrates Robbins's range. Content includes pieces on rocking with the Doors, analyzing Picasso's Guernica, examining contemporary literature, and observations on subjects from tomato sandwiches to what he terms "the genius waitress." The collection also contains an assessment of America's cultural divisions and a sheaf of largely unpublished poems.
Writing Style & Characteristics
Robbins's briefer writings exhibit five defining traits: imaginative wit, cheerfully brash disregard for convention, sweetly nasty eroticism, mystical but keenly observant perspective, and irrepressible love of language. The author describes himself as a "romantic Zen hedonist" and "stray dog in the banquet halls of culture," perspectives that permeate this primarily journalistic compilation.
Critical Reception
The Oregonian has called Tom Robbins "a vital natural resource," while the Financial Times of London named him "one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world." Fernanda Pivano of Italy's Corriere della Sera described him as "the most dangerous writer in the world today."
About Tom Robbins
A Southerner by birth, Tom Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962. Known primarily for his meaty seriocomic novels, this collection offers readers access to his eclectic sensibility through shorter formats. The anthology provides an overview of work that demonstrates the serious playfulness characteristic of his literary output.
Published by Random House Publishing Group in August 2006, this paperback edition makes Robbins's diverse journalistic and creative work accessible in a single volume for readers seeking the full range of an American original's literary voice.
